Another Morphic Tutorial

Doug Way dway at riskmetrics.com
Tue Apr 17 04:17:32 UTC 2001


Dan Shafer wrote:
> 
> How important is it, Alan, for those of us writing tutorials and other docs to
> use this same terminology, in your view? I mean, is this really important stuff
> that has a lot of thought behind it that we shouldn't disturb or should we feel
> free to re-think it?

For what it's worth, I think the current "halo" and "handles" terminology is still the best, even given the discussion so far.

The term "halo" represents an encircling ring, which is what the constellation of colored circles is... there seems to be pretty much unanimous agreement on this term.

There seems to be not quite unanimous agreement on the term "handle" for each individual colored circle, but I still think it's better than "button" or "icon".  More accurately, the circles are a mixture of buttons and handles, but it seems more dangerous to refer to them all as buttons, since that might lead one to not bother trying to drag any of the circles, whereas there's no real harm in thinking that they're all handles and maybe inadvertently trying to drag the menu handle.  I guess I think of "handles" as a more active term, where as buttons or icons are more static.

- Doug Way
  dway at riskmetrics.com


> --- Alan Kay <Alan.Kay at disney.com> wrote:
> > As Josh pointed out, the comments use the internal SqC terminology
> > for these. We call the constellation of colored circles a "halo", and
> > the colored circles themselves are called "handles".
> >
> > Cheers,
> >
> > Alan
> >
> > ------
> >
> > At 10:19 AM -0700 4/15/01, Andrew P. Black wrote:
> > >Re: Terminology.
> > >At 17:41 +0100 2001.04.15, John Hinsley wrote:
> > >
> > >>  > I called the entire surrounding pantheon of icons a halo but I
> > >>think Squeakers
> > >>>  generally call each of the buttons surrounding the selected
> > >>>object a halo. I'm
> > >>>  not sure it matters _too_ much but in tutorials we probably ought
> > >>>to agree on
> > >>>  the terminology.
> > >>
> > >>Yes. Any ideas for what to call the collection of halos? A cluster of
> > >>halos? A hoopla of halos? A holy of halos?
> > >
> > >I think that the whole collection of colored blobs should be called
> > >a halo.  After all, this is close to the accepted meaning of the
> > >term in English.  What then to call each of the colored blobs?  How
> > >about "buttons"?
> > >
> > >Sometime you can avoid using a word at all, by just saying something
> > >like: bring up the Morphic halo on foo, and click the purple
> > >eyedropper.
> > >
> > >     Andrew
> >
> 
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