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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