Improving the aesthetics and usability of Squeak

Jim Benson jb at speed.net
Mon Jul 8 05:47:27 UTC 2002


Alan,

> Good points all.
>       But somebody has to do something with the suggestion in order to
> make it real enough to be included. I happen to like what Jim Benson
> is doing, for example. So the next step is to see whether Jim thinks
> his stuff is far enough along to include. And, especially, whether he
> and/or others would be willing to keep these mechanisms current
> through subsequent releases.

My current plans are to ship a version for 3.2 when it goes gold. Hopefully
I'll generate an image and changeset that contains all of the code and
bitmap images and place it somewhere that everyone can get a hold of it. The
current code is in a state that I call 'Good enough for me' or GEFM. There
are probably some bugs and such still attached, but I don't run across them
in my daily use. Need people to bang on it, and I'm going to try to fix any
bugs that my code introduced that aren't cross purpose.

If folks out there haven't seen it, you can find it at:

http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/ZurgleBugReporting

My code is pretty heavyweight, as such it pretty much requires a faster
machine to be happy.

> And, whether we can get a designer to
> make a variety of skin sets (as you've noticed, everyone on this list
> has their own fairly definite opinions about such things), or whether
> there is a good enough UI for Jim's stuff so that everyone can easily
> roll their own, etc.

I would like to see us build at least one different "Squeak Theme", with
Squeak specific looks and widgets, at the very least so I don't have to ship
this with a Windows XP skin.

There isn't a nice UI for defining what everything looks like in my code, I
think that's a pretty fair amount of work in itself. However, I would be
open to formalizing an external description file of the themes. Most of the
work in making a new theme is just gathering all of the artwork and putting
it together in the correct format. If someone supplies the artwork, I'd be
happy to construct and formalize the layout.

We've talked alot on the list over the years about different UI aspects.
It's pretty clear with the modularization effort going on, now would be a
good time as a community to start examining what a better Squeak UI looks
and behaves like. Andreas felt that there would be quite a lot of benefit in
using some dynamite in some of the uglier places in the windowing code.

There are a couple of other places that need obvious attention on the UI
front. Going forward I think a small group should be able to contribute
quite a bit in this area.

Jim









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