deficience in Squeak

Peter van Rooijen peter at vanrooijen.com
Sat Nov 22 11:42:08 UTC 2003


From: "Adrian Lienhard" <adi at netstyle.ch>
> Peter van Rooijen wrote:
>
> [..]
>
> > This is not the issue. I love spell-check. Spell-check is great. I
> > would turn it on if it wasn't the default.
> >
> > What I don't like is the intrusiveness. Popping up a menu, which
> > can't even be operated with the keyboard, forcing you to reach for
> > the mouse and click something before you can continue.
>
> The keyboard control for menus can be enabled. Search for
> menuKeyboardControl in Prefrences.

Thank you for telling me this. I wish there was a button on the preferences
viewer that opens a window with a simple text documenting all the
preferences. It must be me, but I am simply generally unable to infer what
they do from their name.

It would also be great to be able to save my preferences to an ini type file
which the image will search for on startup, so I don't have to reapply the
preferences each time I start development from a new image.

> I always turn this on because I'm much
> faster like this.

Yes, working in Squeak is really slow for me too. I am perhaps 10 times
slower in Squeak than I am in VisualAge. An important part of that is due to
being more familiar with VA, but the awkwardness of the interaction with GUI
elements is, I think, more than half of it.

Things like windows not being cyclable, chained menus (even though submenus
are available), and waiting for half a second or more before windows
actually close or collapse are also slowing me down. And while I am slower,
I also have to stop working and take serious rest after a relatively short
period (one or two hours), because all the awkward interaction, especially
with the mouse, is hard on the muscles and tendons.

Don't get me wrong. I love Squeak, and I'd love to do more work in it. It's
very well possible it can be configured to be near ideal for my
requirements/taste/style of working. I just don't know how to make it easier
for me to use.

I'd also love for there to be some set of settings that I could apply so
that the feel of Squeak would become much like that of standard MS-Windows.
Not because this is so superior (it is not), because it is so familiar to a
large part of computer users (including most Apple and Unix users, who
usually know very well how to operate MS-Windows).

I am sure that I and others could sell applications built in Squeak much
more easily if the feel was mostly like that of MS-Windows (the look is not
nearly as important as the feel, IMO, in fact the look of MS-Windows is
pretty ugly and Squeak out of the box already looks much better than the
average Windows app). In fact, I am pretty certain I would already have
released at least one app built in Squeak if I could give it that feel.

Hey, it may be only a setting or a change set away!?

> I don't see why it is turned off by default... I'd love to
> have more keyboard control, by the way. E.g., in the browser it would be
> nice to be able to change the focus from category<->classes<->method
> categories<->methods with the keyboard.

Yes, I'd love that too, see above. I think we are not the only ones. But
perhaps we are a little bit afraid to ask for fear of getting a response in
the form of a Wiki link with a number in the thousands (which not so subtly
suggests that we should have read or searched thousands of unofficial
documentation pages before bothering those in the know with our ignorance).
Which just perpetuates the status quo.

Regards,

Peter

> Cheers,
> Adrian




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