Classic and Simple Halos (was: Re: Another Morphic Tutorial)
Scott Wallace
Scott.Wallace at disney.com
Fri Apr 20 20:25:38 UTC 2001
Hi, Richard,
At 12:42 PM +1200 4/19/01, Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:
>Issue 1. Why are the "iconic" handles and the "classic" handles
>in different places? That's really confusing...
"Classic" handles derive from the old solid-circle halo handles that
were the original form used in morphic starting in 1997.
A number of users said that they wanted further visual cues to help
them remember the functions of the handles. We had originally
thought that the combination of color, relative location, and balloon
help would be sufficient, but there was enough clamor on the list
that we instituted a variant form of halo handles that had icons
within the circles. The icons we ended up adopting were primarily
ones created by Bert Freudenberg. When we cut over to "iconic" halos
as the default, we used the opportunity also to tweak positions
somewhat.
The "classic" handles survive as an option in the system only because
we didn't want to pull the rug out from under users who had bonded to
them. As such, we did not want to change their positions.
The "Simple halos" were a once-off experiment requested by Alan a
couple of years ago. The idea was to have a very small number of
quite large handles, each with suggestive graphics, which included an
"escape" that allowed the user to bring up a full set of handles when
desired. In this experiment, we were targeting quite young children,
so consistency with the "professional programmers' system" was never
an issue. With much larger graphics and without other handles to
share the real-estate, there were clearly very different constraints
and goals at play here.
My sense is that essentially everyone in Squeakdom uses the iconic
handles nowadays -- everyone who uses halos at all, that is -- and
consequently we've been considering completely ripping out all
support for both of the other kinds. I'd be interested in hearing
from anyone who *does* use "classic" or "simple" halos, or who feels
they should be retained.
In place of the "classic" handles, perhaps we would substitute a
"plain" handles variant, which would consist of precisely the same
handles as the "iconic" handles, in precisely the same positions, but
would omit the icons. I think this is probably what you (Richard)
were (reasonably) expecting of the "classic" handles in your comment
above. I wonder if anyone would use such "plain" handles if we
offered them, or whether we would be better advised to slim down to
one kind of halo handle.
Incidentally, it was recently pointed out to me that the "more
handles" handle on the "simple" halos no longer works. This is
probably something that got broken during the morphic event work last
October. It's presumably not worth fixing if we're going to rip out
"simple" halos altogether.
The architecture already in place in support the existing
halo-appearance variants presumably would stand us in good stead at
such time as anyone wanted to implement new variants, such as the
"Letter in a Circle" form.
>Issue 2. Shortly after setting the preference to "simple" handles
>and trying them out, Squeak locked up, and a MacOS box appeared in
>the middle of the screen, the text disappearing before I could read it.
>The CD continued to play, but nothing else worked, so I'm rebooting now.
Has anyone else seen this? Perhaps it was coincidental? Richard,
can you reproduce this problem? If so, please send details privately
to me. However, this is another case where the need for a fix -- if
indeed there is a bug here -- will likely be obviated by removal of
the overall "simple halos" feature.
-- Scott
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