[DISCUSSION] Hidden and Open: O'Keefe as "everyman"

Doug Clapp dclapp at qwest.net
Wed Feb 12 15:36:36 UTC 2003


Richard O'Keefe said, among other things...

>> If it had ever occurred to me to try shift-clicking on halo handles, I
might have discovered this ages ago.

Welcome to Squeak!  A oxymoronic environment where things normally hidden --
source code, system innards, etc -- are naked and open to inspection or
change...

and...

where things normally obvious -- how to move a window, features specific to
the application/morph -- are hidden in pop-up menus or halos or
Shift-clicked halos.

How odd!

Fire up World menu/New Morph../Outliner/(oh you haven't figured out how to
make them all show in a sub-menu yet?  Shame on you)
/EToyHierarchicalTextMorph to make an outliner morph.

Well, there  it is!  So...try and use it!  I know, I know..there's no menu
bar with choices and no menu bar at the top of the project window.  But
hey...the specific actions of this morph -- you know: how to add items to
the outliner, indent and so on -- are probably in the halo menu, right?

Let's see.  Make the halo visible, look on the menu.  Nope, not there.

Click madly for a bit.  Wait!  If I don't click on the text, and I don't
click on the triangle...I get a pop-up menu!  It reads

-- expand all below me
-- addChild (pretty "smallTalky" heh? kewl...)
-- delete

Well, ok, I get it now.  That wasn't hard, was it?

The moral?  As above: Features most used and needed by "normal folk" wishing
to do things are hidden or awkward to find and use, while the system itself
is marvelously open and accessible.

Folks, it's 2003.  If we can't have morphs with default menus, can we at
least have a menu bar now???

And can we nuke this 3-button mouse notion?  Some people have "wheel" mice,
where the wheel can be clicked to serve as a 3rd button, but the whole "3
button" thing is odd, distateful, unneeded and a total anachronism.  Put the
common halo commands (like I NEED to rotate my morph???) on a menu bar, make
the item highlighting intelligent (don't get me started on THAT one) and be
done with it!

Jeesh.

Doug










More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list