Sharing with you my enthousiasm

Henrik Gedenryd Henrik.Gedenryd at lucs.lu.se
Thu Apr 26 11:55:36 UTC 2001


Doug Way wrote:

> I may try to integrate some aspects of the Blue Look into the look I was
> working on, to try to get the best of both (and maybe have a few combinations
> of alternatives).  I think it should be possible to get something together
> that we can all more or less agree on.

> The 
> alpha blending is cool, but should probably be a preference.

I thought about this a while ago, and I realized that to get a new look
accepted into the image, we would need a whole bunch of preferences. This is
because Squeak may run on an incredible variety of hardware, with varying
performance.

We'd therefore need switches to let you adapt the UI fanciness to the level
of your hardware, much like many games allow you to change graphics
parameters so that the game runs well on your machine. Thus the prefs should
show what things are resource-hungry (alpha and shadows come to mind).

>From this, I thought it would be a short distance to merging your stuff and
mine together, simply making the differences a matter of preference,
literally. (Different colors for different window types? etc.) In this way
everyone would have the best of both worlds etc.

Btw, the NewLookSampleProject on BSS doesn't seem to load correctly (into
3.1 at least).

So this is what I had in mind though I haven't gotten around to it.

Then there's a second big problem that needs to be addressed. The
SystemWindow code is a big sorry mess. As it is, the same coordinates for
widget locations occur two or three times, for example. Also, at one time my
code seemed to break with every third update change set or so, it was like
SystemWindow was Grand Central Station. This was when I got fed up with
keeping my look working.

I think that the title bar should be made into a submorph and all related
code moved there. This should solve many problems, if not all. I don't know
what this would mean for MVC compatibility, however.

> On the other hand, I'm trying to make my changeset look good with the
> multi-colored windows of Squeak, which I think is probably a necessary
> requirement for getting it accepted by SqC & the community.

I am curious: How many of you out there prefer multicolored windows
(backgrounds, not title bars)? If so, what is it that you like? Or is this
just a legacy thing that has just been hanging on and you aren't really
bothered enough to care about it? Perhaps this has been on the table before.

Doug, you can mail me off list if you think this is the time to do it, so we
can set up the work agenda.

Henrik






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