Morphic as default project

Doug Way dway at mat.net
Tue Mar 14 02:32:39 UTC 2000


I was just reading John McIntosh's preliminary SqueakEnd report (see
http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/1235 ).  I figured I had to comment on
the "out of the box" discussion...

> The out of the box experience is raw. Downloading doesn't work because
> of the linefeed issue, much time and energy is take with this issue,
> we should have solved that years agao. Hitting the window title
> changes it, ARG!. Since it looks different it's difficult to deal with
> from a novice user viewpoint, flop out scroll bars, PLEASE. We need a
> way to give a good first user experience. However remember it's still
> a development environment, but is it? Don't confuse it with a
> simplistic environment. If we can get the environment 70% there from a
> look/feel viewpoint on a particular OS then people will be happy.
> Right now it's a very different UI experience, this was agreed to be a
> bad thing.
>
> ...
> 
> It was suggested that Squeak should shipped locked down, then the user
> can jump to his knowledge level that allows him better experience
> Squeak. We should jump to Morphic directly this gives better
> experience, but it is slow? Could we make MVC a separate environment?
> Yes Dan pointed out MVC is mostly separate we could dispose of it.
> Here is an opportunity to make changes to the environment and we
> should seize the opportunity and run with it to better the experience.
> {Key point to drop MVC or make it a file in, Key point to go with
> Morphic at the start}

I think this is overdue.  Shipping the base image with Morphic rather than
MVC as the default project, that is.  Is there a plan to do this with the
final Squeak 2.8 release?  (Pretty please?)

Doing this is a simple way to fix most of the more obvious "out of the
box" problems mentioned in the first paragraph.  You're probably
reasonably close to "70% there".

Probably a more important reason for doing this is that Morphic is where
most new Squeak development is happening, and thus a lot of Squeak
documentation, Preferences, changesets, etc., assume that you're running
Morphic.  Basically, there's a fundamental disconnect in having Squeak
start with one type of UI, while much of it assumes that you're using a
different UI.  Plus there are more UI bugs which have crept into MVC,
which have been fixed in Morphic, but not fixed in MVC because of disuse.  
(E.g., you can't resize the Method Finder window in MVC.)

(Some might argue that Morphic is slower than MVC, but it seems roughly
equivalent to me, slower in some respects, but faster in others.  For
example, moving/resizing windows (with fastDrag default), scrolling, etc.,
is pretty similar.  Redrawing invalidated areas is faster (and smoother)
in Morphic because of the double-buffering.  One thing I noticed on a
slowish machine I have is that the World menu takes somewhat longer to
open in Morphic than in MVC, that's odd.  In any case I don't think this
is a serious problem for first-time users, compared with the problems
above.  Certainly expert Squeakers can still use MVC easily enough, if
they have performance problems with Morphic.)

I wouldn't necessarily advocate dumping MVC completely from the base
image, though... it might be nice to have a "Play With Me - 9" which opens
up an MVC project for folks to play with.  Maybe this could be available
for awhile in the base image before dropping MVC.  But MVC should
definitely *not* be the first-impression default project.

- Doug Way
  EAI/Transom Technologies, Ann Arbor, MI
  http://www.transom.com
  dway at mat.net, @eai.com





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