Another Morphic Tutorial

G.J.Tielemans at dinkel.utwente.nl G.J.Tielemans at dinkel.utwente.nl
Tue Apr 24 09:03:03 UTC 2001


After finishing Dan's counter tutorial, I started with your Rolodex: Nice
demo to show a little of the power of the Smalltalk toolbox and the flavours
of Morphing. Also nice to have this description of the strange fall out (and
the solution: I already met the problem at Dan's tutorial, but thought that
it was stupid me...)

(By the way, where do I leave comments like the fact that when I got a
message in the bottom-window of my windows-version of SqueackFinal (from the
main website www.squaek.org, feb 28) the area control in that part of the
screen is lost, the borders of the text-window do not function normal and I
cannot reach the tab of supplies anymore?)

Back to the demo: In your demo I had another strange effect: The word
Rolodex in the title goes from right to left... I started to play with the
Halo buttons, had my fun with the rotate button, but ended up with Rolodex
upside down and all the letters in the wrong direction... I also wandered
what the meaning was of this small blue circle with the green arrow (Of
course this has nothing to do with your demo, but it made me wonder...
Opening the View of this object, as I learned in Dan's tutorial, made me
create a lot of boxes until my system frooze and I had to restart Squeak. I
am lucky to have a faster machine since a week.

As newbie I started to wonder:

Why not creating something like "Living tutorial-pages", with some sweets
from the Swiki-concept I like...
1. Create a Swiki-site with tutorial pages
2. Take ownership for your own page(s)
3. Lock the page, but open a comment-box for newbies (and another one for
expert-comments?)
4. maintain the tutorial-related questions and answers in a faq-file on your
page.
(Swiki can send automatic there-is-a-change-on-your-page-email to you, the
owner)
5. send general questions to other page-owners, like the morphic-documenter,
and so on..
6. update your tutorial
7. (version control of previous releases of the page is already built-in in
the Swiki)     
8. Someone with an educational vision on Squeak has to organize the
tutorial-tree (Dan?)
9. even newbies can start their own page in this concept... Giving you lots
of information of there (wrong?) way of looking at the Squeak-beast, It can
help you to improve your own - maybe a little expert-biased - tutorials by
simplifying and explaining the reason why..?

-----Original Message-----
From: Scott Wallace [mailto:Scott.Wallace at disney.com]
Sent: Wednesday, April 18, 2001 8:29 AM
To: Richard A. O'Keefe
Subject: Re: Another Morphic Tutorial


At 5:42 PM +1200 4/18/01, Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:

>I've spent some time poking around trying to figure out where the
>"icons" are held.  What should I do to replace these pictures with ones
>the same size and same predominant colour, but with strongly contrasting
>capital letters inside?


Richard:

Look at WonderlandCameraMorph method #installPoohIcon for an example 
of how one can replace the graphic for any given halo handle.

Then look at Preferences class method #iconicHaloSpecifications for 
the list of names by which the graphics underlying the various halo 
icons are known.

One rather labor-intensive way you could proceed would be to 
construct the icons you like (construct them with EllipseMorphs and 
TextMorphs, for example), then, in turn, grab each one from the 
screen (Form fromUser inspect), evaluate "self storeString" in each 
resulting Inspector to obtain a programmatical constructor for it, 
and then use code similar to that found in #installPoohIcon to get 
the resulting forms into the ScriptingSystem's FormDictionary.

Alternatively, it would not take too much effort to write a little 
method which, given a table of names, colors, and letters, would 
programmatically construct the desired forms and save them in the 
appropriate place; for each kind of handle, it could create an 
EllipseMorph of the appropriate size and colour, then add a 
StringMorph or TextMorph with the right characteristics to the 
EllipseMorph (as a submorph,) then obtain the resulting outer morph's 
#imageForm, and finally save that form in the ScriptingSystem's form 
dictionary.

Hope this helps.

   -- Scott





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