On Dec 20, 2004, at 2:46 PM, Michael Latta wrote:

> Another source of this impression is that the system browser keeps 
> breaking on me.  The bottom pane keeps getting messed up.  The scroll 
> bars often stick out below the bottom of the window.  I had the 
> browser get confused about the switching between one and two bottom 
> panes.  At times there were 3 areas below the row of buttons, with 
> scroll bars that overlapped.  Then when I selected a method, the text 
> was in a pane that was the top 1/3 of the bottom area.  After loading 
> a package recently the top set of lists and buttons disappeared.  The 
> row of buttons can easily be resized to smaller than the buttons 
> themselves, cutting them off.  I suspect the 3.7 browser is less 
> stable because of the added comment pane for class selections (which I 
> like a lot), has this gotten better in more recent versions?

I haven't seen any of the problems you mention with the system browser 
(except for the resizing of the buttons pane).  Can you get any of 
those other bugs to happen consistently?

I can't say for sure, but I'm guessing that most of the instability 
you're seeing is from installing a lot of different packages.  
Unfortunately it's very easy to write a package which attempts to fix 
bugs by overwriting a lot of methods, which then tends to cause lots of 
breakage when the package gets out of date and is loaded into a later 
version of Squeak.

I typically don't load more than a few packages in one image... and I 
tend to stick with the packages that I know are safe.  (It's sometimes 
useful to treat images as throwaways, it's easy to save multiple copies 
of an image, or run multiple images at once, etc.  As opposed to, say, 
most Java IDE's, which won't let you run more than one IDE at a time, 
and it's a pretty big hassle to even save a backup.)

Also remember that the whole SqueakMap/packaging thing is still 
relatively new... the "published" concept was only added a few months 
ago for example, and there's no real dependency/configuration scheme 
yet.  I think some of these issues will work themselves out eventually. 
  For example, there may eventually be certain package formats which are 
determined to be "safe" to load, at least in terms of not directly 
conflicting with code in other packages.  These formats may become more 
popular/favored as people discover they cause fewer problems, etc.

- Doug


> On Dec 20, 2004, at 11:38 AM, Michael Latta wrote:
>
>> I tried loading Connectors, but it was not a good experience:
>>
>> 1) There was no published version for any Squeak version.
>> 2) After saying take any version it could find, it was missing a 
>> prerequisite.  Loading anyway only loaded code that was missing other 
>> classes.
>> 3) Assuming I did the wrong thing by going to SqueakMap, I went back 
>> to the SqueakMap page and tried the home page link, only to be told 
>> it did not exist.
>>
>> This is not a good testament for Squeak.  I do not know if it is just 
>> a lot of undocumented magic tricks to make this work, or what.  I 
>> would really like to use Squeak, but it is getting harder and harder 
>> to see it as anything more than a collection of unfinished research 
>> projects.  Please help me correct this impression.
>>
>> Michael
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Dec 20, 2004, at 2:13 AM, Lic. Edgar J. De Cleene wrote:
>>
>>> On 20/12/04 00:51, "Michael Latta" <lattam at mac.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> 4) Can I control the layering of morphs?
>>> Yes, if for layering you means several moprphs is same place and 
>>> what you
>>> normally could grab the top morph.
>>> Morphs add to anothers Morphs reverse, so try
>>> | myColors container e |
>>> myColors _ #('red' 'white' 'black' 'yellow' 'green').
>>> container _ BorderedMorph new.
>>> container extent: 100 at 100.
>>> container openCenteredInWorld.
>>> myColors do: [:layer| e _ EllipseMorph new.
>>> e color: (Color fromString:  layer);center: container center.
>>> container addMorph: e]
>>>
>>> The green Ellipse should be the only you see, but with halo click 
>>> you could
>>> access all .
>>>
>>>> 5) The squeak books at Amazon looked old (3.4 or so).  Is there a
>>>> current reference that covers Morphic as it exists now?
>>> The Mark Guzdial white book is 2.9 to 3.0 and only significative 
>>> change was
>>> envolve fron AlignmentMorph to TableLayout , but two still exists in 
>>> 3.8.
>>> So any Morphic from books could work with this change.
>>> All problems what we have now is for other changes.
>>>
>>>> 6) Can I anchor a morph to the outside of another morph, or only 
>>>> inside
>>>> another morph?  If I want handles on a morph, do I need to place a
>>>> parent morph to hold the handles and the morph being edited?
>>> Yes. And if marvelous Connectors from Ned are too much , I have nice 
>>> pet
>>> projects what would share with you.
>>>
>>> Fell free to email private if you wish
>>> Edgar
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>
>