A New Look and Feel for Squeak

Stefan Matthias Aust sma at 3plus4.de
Sun Jul 2 08:47:20 UTC 2000


IMHO, feel is more important than look.

Squeak not only looks different, but it feels different.  From my 
experience, people would actually accept a different look - at least if it 
looks professional (read boring or elegant).  Squeak's colorful windows 
will perhaps irritate a business customer, but a more uniform look (flat or 
3D doesn't really matter) is okay.

However, popping menu bars, popup menus, missing menu bars, the way 
keyboard selection works, strange (from the viewpoint of Windows or Unix) 
keyboard shortcuts and so on makes it difficult if not impossible to use a 
Squeak MVC or Morphic UI for a typical commerical application.

Different people have different goals.  A few goals are

* exact look and feel of one platform, best implemented with native widgets

* classic look best suited for data entry programs

* web page-style look best suited for information systems

* something that's different to <insert hated platform>

* something really innovative

* something that allows one to create business application in Squeak


I'm currently in favor for the last point.  I believe that it's not 
required to perfectly immitate one look but if you look at most UIs, you'll 
notice that they all fell quite similar.  I believe you can define and 
implement this meta-feel which will be suficient for people to work with 
the application.  The look might be customizable to further ease acceptance 
of the users.

I don't want to experiment with innovative UI concepts right now or makeup 
something that's different just for to be not similar to an existing 
look.  People should find the look and feel familiar because this is what 
makes an UI "intuitive".

bye
--
Stefan Matthias Aust  //  Bevor wir fallen, fallen wir lieber auf





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