Harvesting Process is not working

Stephen Pair stephen at pairhome.net
Wed Nov 5 15:18:41 UTC 2003


Agreed.  We should make it a goal to enhance the visual first impression 
with each release.  To accomplish that, might it be necessary to start 
distributing a "kitchen sink" image with nearly everything on SqueakMap 
included?  The individual package maintainers can design what the first 
impression of their package should be.

- Stephen

Andreas Raab wrote:

>[Running on a huge backlog of Squeak mail]
>
><cg at tric.nl> wrote:
>  
>
>>Marcus, this is a jewel of circular reasoning:
>>
>>"Let's make Squeak modular and distribute less in the base image"
>>"Yeah, cool!"
>>    
>>
>
>Uhm ... I don't recall Marcus saying that actually. So from that POV your
>argumentation is definitely a stretch.
>
>  
>
>>"Hey, here is SqueakMap where you can register anything that doesn't
>> land in the base image"
>>"Great" (200-or-so packages get registered)
>>"Here is Squeak 3.6 - less of the same, just as we promised"
>>    
>>
>
>Yes and no. There _is_ something to be said about marketing and first
>impressions. It may well be that the primary objective of Squeak 3.6 (and
>3.7 and 3.8) is to be "less of the same" but it doesn't mean that the user
>visible _impression_ has to be the same. To be blunt, what we got in 3.6 are
>some interesting new bits and pieces of technology (TTF and SqueakMap for
>example) but none of this has any impact on the user. From the first
>impression, 3.6 looks precisely the same as 3.5 did. As 3.4 did. As 3.3 did.
>As 3.2 did.
>
>And so, saying that
>
>  
>
>>"Squeak is dead"
>>    
>>
>
>is an impression that a user who doesn't see all that technology behind the
>curtain (which isn't exposed to him in any way whatsoever) can easily get
>to.
>
>The point being, of course, that people have to have a way of _recognizing_
>the differences and it isn't that hard to imagine how to present that. For
>example, in 3.6 we would have had the ability to show off these pieces of
>technology by, for example, having Diego's look enhancements (which use the
>TTF stuff) in there and active (if you don't like them, cover them by a
>preference which you can turn off) and by having the Squeakmap loader wide
>open to show people how much stuff is available on Squeakmap. I'm sure that
>there are other places in which these bits and pieces can be show-cased and
>we really need to do this. A few sentences in the Welcome window (no matter
>how well phrased) just don't cut it.
>
>And no, I don't think that the harvesting process (which I have quite
>dedicated opinions about; some good some bad) is related to this but then
>again, if we talk about people looking at Squeak it's the first impression
>that matters. Given that we have a huge amount of technology inside Squeak,
>given that we have even more on SqueakMap it becomes increasingly important
>for us to provide something that people can hold onto, that they can use to
>distinguish between (say) Squeak 3.6 and Squeak 3.7. Even if it is only the
>arrangement of Windows or morphs on the welcome screen (which hasn't changed
>since 3.2 either I think) it is important that when you start Squeak there
>is something that tells "oh, that's the new version - there's got to be some
>cool new stuff in here" instead of "oh, looks like the last version -
>probably nothing new in here".
>
>Cheers,
>  - Andreas
>
>
>  
>





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