Just a suggestion ...

Forget about the Mac or the PC, and concentrate on an Internet 
Interface. These have to be universal, and the current (mostly) html 
ones are pretty rudimentary. This is fresh ground for new ideas. Most 
of the next billion machines are not going to be either Macs or PCs 
.... but will certainly be connected to Internet.

Cheers,

Alan

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At 6:02 PM +1000 6/27/00, Karl Goiser wrote:
>G'day,
>
>I have a lot of trouble thinking about the idea of a business 
>interface for squeak.
>
>I use Macs and when people talk about business applications and 
>computers for business, they mean pc's (at least here in Australia). 
>I can tell you from experience that people using machines on one 
>platform will not accept an application running on their machine 
>that looks and runs like an other platform (Mac, Unix, pc, whatever).
>
>This is my understanding of why VisualWorks never really took off in 
>the business area (that and the high costs to purchase) - they came 
>very close to emulating, for example, the Mac ui, but not acceptably 
>close enough.
>
>The questions about a user interface are:
>
>- Do you succumb to a particular platform and just make it for that 
>one, shutting out all the others, like Dolphin and VisualSmalltalk?
>
>- Do you try to be everything for everybody, doing nothing 
>perfectly, like VisualWorks?
>
>
>***
>The thing that I'm starting to understand about Squeak is that its 
>real advantage is in that it doesn't look like anything else!  You 
>can't complain that it's too Mac like or too windows like if it 
>looks like neither!
>
>I have a suspicion that building a standard UI for Squeak might be 
>the death of it.
>***
>
>
>The only thing that I can think that might work would be to specify 
>an interface/protocol simple enough to be usable across all the 
>currently deployed platforms and then build a native UI for each 
>platform, just like happens with FileDirectory now.
>
>For example, you could have an abstract text entry field with a 
>specific protocol that could then be implemented across the 
>different platforms.  The actual widgets could even be rendered 
>natively.
>
>The trouble would be in handling specific platform requirements, 
>like the single menu bar on the Mac.
>
>...
>
>
>Karl