Stef, et al,

To answer your second question, paraphrasing  “What works and how can we
improve things?”  NOTE  These are my opinions.  I don’t claim to speak for
anyone else.


Packages/facilities already there:

Shout syntax highlighting.  I see color better than print.  Shout is a life
saver.  I had something like it in Visual Age with Eric Clayburg’s
excellent VA Assist Pro tools.

Connectors and Jacaranda of course.  Who can do serious object design
without them?

Squeakmap just keeps getting better.

The square and round lenses in the parts bin are occasionally useful

I have used the speaker class as a debugging aid to tell me when I’ve
passed though certain methods.

The morphic font editor is useful.  I make the brackets and braces easier
to distinguish for the code font by elongating them a little.

The friendly open community of Squeak is one of its greatest assets.  The
fact that we can discuss difficult issues without resorting to @#$% is so
refreshing and even helpful.  People actually think here.

The free nature of Morphic is very valuable.  Tilting and colorizing text
in my diagrams makes developing designs so much easier.  Life would be so
much less fun without the green halo to duplicate a living morph.


Things that would help

Where does one set the colors in Shout.  I haven’t disassembled it enough
to tell (yet).

ColorDevTools seems to destroy my file list browser and regular browsers
when I try to load it.  I haven’t really dug into why yet.  I liked the
colorization of added, deleted, changed categories and methods in the lists
in the change sorter.


Things that would be nice to have

A better sounding speaker class.  I’m not well versed in the speech model
Squeak is using and just need to find the time to dig into it.

A more robust web browser and mail client.  By this I mean, better support
for the more complex web pages.

A way to export vector images.  I know how hard this one is.  I did some of
it in a previous life back in the bad old 8088 days.

A version of Jacarands that does Connectors 2.  Hernan, I know you’re at
least as boged down as I am.  Magnificent works of art cannot be rushed.
Take the time you need to make it a thing of beauty.


I hope this gives you some insight.


Thanks again from
tap