A New Look and Feel for Squeak

Les Tyrrell tyrrell at canis.uiuc.edu
Mon Jul 3 06:57:01 UTC 2000


Eric Arseneau wrote:
> 

[ snip ! ]

> > > Perhaps both could be done, but it seems to me to be a waste of time
> > > to write code to make Squeak look like another operating system.
> > Web browsing presents a quite different UI to most OSs, and offers at
> > least a chance that we can force open the door to something better. One
> > of the things I particularly dislike about all the .NET BS is the
> > transparent attempt by M$ to make the web look like windows. Yuck.
> 
> One of the great advantages of writing Squeak code to emulate the OS widgets
> is that it then allows us to include innovation with the status quo.  We can
> deliver a package that uses the standard run of the mill UI.  But then, at
> the flick of a switch we can change it to a much more intuitive UI.  This
> allows the users to be drawn in and appreciate the app itself, and then find
> that there are better and more efficient ways to work with it, once they
> have become dependent on the app.

This would be a great place to put in a reference to a paper that was apparently
written by some of the ParcPlace folks who then went on to Sun to build Swing.
A shame that I don't have that handy, so if you could kindly read my mind...

I mention this because one of the issues that was raised in the paper, which
was about re-implementing VW's GUI code, was that it was hard to keep up
with the changes made by OS vendors, and that the emulated widgets would
be close, but too often not quite close enough.  If I recall, they set
out to build a solution, using pattern-oriented development, in which
they had both native and emulated widgets on all OS platforms- the emulated
widgets could then pick up the slack as VW was moved to an OS where a
given widget was not available, while ordinarily one would be using
native widgets.

- les





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