Hidden Information

Brent Vukmer bvukmer at blackboard.com
Thu Jul 10 15:03:34 UTC 2003


> >
> > This is an extremely nice feature of Squeak, but the UI is 
> obviously 
> > very confusing.  

I was just playing with this.  I typed in "BugFixArchiveViewer",
highlighted it, hit Alt-6 and selected "Link to definition of class".
Click on the newly-linkified "BugFixArchiveViewer" and a "Linked by
HyperText" window opens.  So far so good!

However now I can't seem to type regular text following the link; the
cursor stays in the little hand shape and anything I type in the
workspace following the "BugFixArchiveViewer" link, also becomes a link
to the BugFixArchiveViewer class definition.  Is that a bug? If not,
it's definitely unclear/unintuitive how to mark the end of a link.

I also found it confusing that although I can go back and forth between:

click<BugFixArchiveViewer viewGsugSwikiFixesArchive> to open the BFAV
 - and -
*click* to open the BFAV

via Alt-6 + "Do it", and Alt-6 + "Edit hidden text" -- but I couldn't do
the same thing with:

BugFixArchiveViewer<BugFixArchiveViewer Definition>
 - and -
*BugFixArchiveViewer*

> >
> > It's not even the active text that is the best, IMHO.  It's the 
> > ability to link to methods, classes, class comments, and 
> URL's.  This 
> > ability lets you make a little Swiki within each image.  
> It's a superb 
> > opportunity for documentation.  

This feature would be more intuitive, for me at least, if clicking on
links within Squeak brought up the Browser instead of the MessageSet
window -- and if the Browser acted like a Web browser when handling
Squeak links ( history, back button, forward button ).




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