[ On Sunday, May 13, 2001 at 11:07:51 (-0700), Andrew P. Black wrote: ]
> Subject: RE: Squeak textbox and events.
>
> We have the tools to do something that might feel more natural, at 
> least to someone unused to the Smalltalk Paragraph Editor.  That is: 
> we have balloons, as used in balloon help.  It seems to me a balloons 
> would be a natural place to put an error message.

That may not be so bad an idea....  If the compiler were taught to
continue on and find more likely errors after re-syncing with the next
something that it can understand again then a novice who makes lots of
errors might end up with a really cool-looking code pane....  :-)

They shouldn't look like help balloons though -- maybe more like a
puffer-fish or something equally spiked or sharp-cornered, and they
should have more explicit arror-shaped pointers to indicate the exact
location of the error.  And of course they should be some colour
appropriate to warnings or danger (which as we should know by now must
be something that can be adjusted by preference since all the world's
not North America... :-).

Sort of like an editor annotating a paper manuscript with sticky-notes.

This would in effect be something like what I once thought of a long
long time ago when I first encountered Smalltalk.  Indeed back then I
thought of the inserted warning message in something like this way
because it was already selected and could thus be instantly eliminated
again.

Coming back to Smalltalk again now I do find that I often forget to
delete the selected error message before I set the new insertion point
and indeed sometimes I find I don't want to delete the error message
text until after I've fixed the error.  I have just recently discovered
I can use Ctrl-" to make the error into a comment though....

>  What I can't 
> figure out is: when is the "natural" time to make the balloons 
> disappear?

Why not when they're clicked on, or at the latest when the pane is
accepted again?  They could even be dragged out of the way too (can a
morph be sub-morph without being in the same screen area as its parent
morph?).  Perhaps they could also expand and incorporate the original
text for reference too once any change is made in their context.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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