On 3/29/02 7:06 PM, "Norton, Chris" <chrisn at Kronos.com> wrote:

> 
> If you look at the Swiki, you'll see lots of cool screenshots of
> Squeak-tweaks that people have done over the years.  Unfortunately, most of
> these tweaks never got past the "ain't it cool" stage.  The really hard part
> of any project is to find someone who will stay the course and finish it.
> 

Chris, you are correct.  The work to do this is not a one day job.  However,
I can tell you, as one of the folks that have done it once, the really hard
parts are:

    1.  To apply a "look" across the board requires changes to a lot of
classes in the tools themselves.  At this point it's still needing of
additional refactoring.  And the work to do that AND to the "look" can be
overwhelming.

    2.  I never really ever heard positive feedback to finish the work from
anyone other than the "newbies".  It could just be me, but it felt like
getting "skins" or "themes" or the work that Jim Benson had been doing (what
do you call that stuff nowadays Jim?) was looked upon as a waste of time by
the more senior Squeakers out there.  It was hard to get "Buy-in" on the
work and, in my case since the skins project was just my way of learning
about drawing things for the first time in Morphic (I was heavy into MVC
prior to that project), it was no longer worth the effort. I gave up and
went on to other things.  When you make a major change to the product you
have to have some level of support for the base factorings you need or
you'll end up constantly in software maintenance mode.

I agree with the sentiment that a sexy look is good marketing.  I truly
believe that.  When a product is a pleasure to look at people want to know
more about it.  In the case of Smalltalk, after they hopefully see the
lightness of the language and depth of the class hierarchy they will be
hooked.

 - Steve