FWIW --

I'm all for improvements in the look of Squeak in any and all nooks 
and crannies.

Cheers,

Alan

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At 10:49 PM -0500 3/29/02, Stephan B. Wessels wrote:
>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


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