Re-doing Morphic ( Was: Re: Traits prototype image )
Ned Konz
ned at bike-nomad.com
Mon Feb 10 17:14:51 UTC 2003
On Friday 07 February 2003 07:20 am, Brent Vukmer wrote:
> If anything, I think we should start another list to discuss
> cleaning up and redoing Morphic. It needs help. Morphic is the face
> that Squeak presents the world. Having widgets that don't clip
> properly when windows had them since 2.0 is an EMBARASSMENT!
It seems to me like there's several different Morphic topics being
discussed recently.
We're talking about (at least):
* Morphic itself: composition, liveness, event handling, stepping,
uniformity of interface, properties
* Standard user and programmer interactions with Morphs (halos, hand,
etc.)
* Things built with Morphic: widgets, other Morphs
* Using Morphic to build "standard" UIs (consistent widget sets, UI
builders)
* Support code for eToys and other environments like Wonderland and
Croquet (players, vocabularies, etc.)
* The programmer experience (how easy is it to build things)
* The learning curve (how easy is it to figure out how to build
things) (my preference is for steep (that is, quickly learned given
enough focus) learning curves)
* Morphic's documentation and tutorials
All of these are to be found in what we've been broadly discussing as
Morphic. I'd argue that these are separate problems which should be
discussed dealt with separately.
Some of the problems I've heard discussed here relate to widgets and
their use. These problems are at a different (and more trivial) level
than Morphic itself.
That is: if Morphic (the infrastructure) itself is adequate, then it's
a SMOP to rewrite or replace the existing widgets.
Other complaints are primarily code esthetics: Morph has lots of
methods; there's impenetrable code in HandMorph and event handling,
etc.
Still others relate to the ease of learning. As Andreas notes, part of
this problem is due to the use of inheritance for behavioral reuse
(which forces lots of methods into Morph). And our standard tools
don't really reduce the evident level of complexity far enough to
prevent the all too frequent effect of new learners being overwhelmed
by the sheer size of the interface. New tools like Traits and scoped
browsers may help somewhat by scoping the available vocabulary.
Some complaints have been about performance (speed of constructing
complex morphs like browsers and menus, damage calculation and extra
redrawing, event handling, etc.).
Some other complaints (like part of the quoted one) have to do with
the appearance or behavior of "standard" widgets. Many people believe
that Squeak should provide widgets that are at least as competent and
attractive as the Windows ones (some also feel that these widgets
should *look like* the Windows ones).
And so on...
Rather than saying "Morphic needs a rewrite" (which isn't likely to
spur anyone into action), if you feel there's a problem somewhere in
a *specific area*, then it would be better to discuss the problem in
its proper scope and offer suggestions (better, volunteer to lead an
effort to come up with concrete solutions).
--
Ned Konz
http://bike-nomad.com
GPG key ID: BEEA7EFE
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