[Squeak] Need for GUI-Building-Tool

Charles Hixson charleshixsn at earthlink.net
Mon Jul 15 17:10:30 UTC 2002


Kevin Fisher wrote:

>I've only just begun playing with BobsUI and I must say, it's very nice...I
>certainly wish there was a 'standard' widget-like set of classes (like BobsUI)
>in the default Squeak image.  I know that relatively 'simple' things like
>creating a text entry box that accepts anything typed into it without an
>explicit "carriage return" (accept) has stymied me in the past..but obviously,
>the BobsUI rolodex example does it properly (had I known about it, I would have
>used it in a previous project).
>
>...
>
Those are nice features, but the main thing that a standardized 
GUI-Builder would need to contribute would be a way to create a dialog 
that could be frozen (i.e., the character and position of the fields 
fixed in place), but which could later be melted, so that redesigns were 
possible.  There are large areas that are closed to Squeak because of 
the lack of the way of building fixed dialogs.  The other big need is 
for a comparable report generator.

The environment I'm comparing this against is MS Access.  Now the 
programming language of MS Access it terrible.  But because it's easy to 
build dialogs and reports, it's quite popular.  It certainly isn't 
spectacular as a database.  It's internally inconsistent.  Programs tend 
to break if you leave them to be used.  Versions are inconsistent, and 
later versions tend to corrupt earlier versions.  But it's strengths in 
Dialog design and Report design are sufficient to overwhelm these other 
problems.  I hate it, but I generally end up deciding that it's the best 
tool that I can find for the job at hand.  I really tried to get Squeak 
in as a replacement for some applications, but design criteria insist on 
the dialogs being freezeable.  (They claim frozen, but they keep coming 
back to me with change requests.  But they come to me, they don't *want* 
to be able to make the changes themselves.  And management doesn't want 
it either.)

I realize that this isn't the primary area of interest for Squeak 
development, but it seems to me that the ability to freeze and melt a 
dialog should be pretty easy to implement (of course, I say this as 
someone who has never completed the tutorial ... once I was told the 
featues I needed weren't available, I stopped actively looking).  And it 
would open up Squeak to a large number of new users.  (Of course, it 
would take them time to learn about it, but making it possible is the 
first step.)

-- 
-- Charles Hixson
Gnu software that is free,
The best is yet to be.






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