One thing that's been bouncing around in my head for a while is the 
desire for a resolution independent UI based on vector graphics. I was 
really interested in Daniel Joyce's post about GTK's use of SVG. I had 
been investigating SVG for use in Seaside apps, and was struck by the 
thought that it would probably work well as a GUI for Squeak too.

We might want to use SVG only as a serialization format, but the 
imaging model is quite nice. The IDL for the DOM is a little heavy as 
it's geared toward Java/C++ implementations, but it looks like a 
reasonably good Squeak interpretation wouldn't be hard, particularly if 
we used Traits.

On top of that, I'd like to see a set of widgets with consistent 
behavioural semantics, but variable appearance. This would give us 
themes, which I think is a useful feature in a system as portable as 
Squeak, as well as the NeXT-style NIB functionality that Todd 
mentioned. A squeak version of InterfaceBuilder would be great!

I figure if we're going to put significant effort into user interface, 
let's start fresh. The other approach of simply cleaning up the worst 
areas of the existing Morphic code would be useful as well, but 
anything in between would probably not be worth the effort.



Colin Putney
Whistler.com