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