Fixing the look of squeak in 3.9.

John Pierce john.raymond.pierce at gmail.com
Sun Jun 19 01:44:07 UTC 2005


> Now, as for look and feel stuff for Squeak, the suggested 
> LookEnhancments-jrp.
> 12 is quite reasonable as a small but definite improvement. I certainly 
> prefer
> the black text on white background. A lot of the following commentary is 
> not
> specifically the 'fault' of the suggested improvements, so please don't 
> think
> I'm blaming Ben & John.


Keep in mind that we worked up these look enhancements to meet the following 
critieria:

1. Stay within the current SystemWindow framework and, as such, we did not 
focus on addressing problems with all the UI widgets and we did not focus on 
makiing a complete overhaul to the visual style.
2. Make a few high impact changes to give a new look and feel while modifyng 
the least amount of code since we were modifying SystemWindow and other 
Morphic objects.

> The window frame is ok in general.
> 
> I'm not convinced by the very flat appearance of the frame buttons,
> particularly not by the ugly grey circle that appears when you press them. 
> I'd
> also point out that the 'collapse circle' is really ugly; a decently anti-
> aliased one ought to be easy to cache. In general something supposed to be 
> a
> button ought to have some visual separation from its background. It should 
> have
> a clearly different but related appearance while it is pushed.


This is already built into squeak. We only turned 
"alternativeWindowBoxesLook" off in preferences.

The inner frames are too thick in my opinion and rather intrusive. I'd say 
> make
> them thinner and mark the divider-mover part with a dark line rather than
> making the whole thing thick enough to fit a dot inside. There is an old 
> and
> very annoying problem with the divider stuff in that the cursor changes 
> and
> seems to jam up the UI - an artifact of uncompleted event driven changes I
> suspect. I suggest the divider should have movability only in a marked 
> place
> (the centre, normally) and not along its entire length. I'll note in 
> passing
> that morphic produces divider behaviour at the top of the 
> 'instance|?|class'
> buttons as well even though no visual divider exists. Nasty.


I think these are mostly issues with SystemWindow. The divider behavior is 
actually quite intertwined in SystemWindow and hard to modify. We did make 
the dividers 6 pixels wide. If that is too wide, I suspect we could 
ultimately make them 3 pixels with a 1 pixel divider handle in the middle. I 
would have to explore the implications of usability.

> Window resizing handles - nicer than assumed ones all over the place. More
> clear difference to the divider handles would be good. The performance 
> when
> resizing is appalling on my machine, suggesting some optimisation would be
> beneficial. One UI facility I find useful on RISC OS when risiezing is 
> that if
> you drag the resize handles to/past the edge of the screen, the topleft 
> moves
> up & left so the window can grow.


Again, these are mostly comments about SystemWindow in general. I agree in 
general. The divider handles which dub as our resizing handles I've kind of 
grown attached to, but there are a lot of different styles one could imaging 
if we just had a more versitle theme engine built into Squeak.

> Window moving. Morphic seems to assume that if you grab something in a 
> place
> that does nothing else you obviously want to move it. I really hate that 
> for
> windows. Especially since there seem to be small but too-easily touchable
> places in every window.


Agreed.

> Roundedcorners. Yuck. So utterly passe and kindergarten-winXP.


This one is quite interesting. Seems that everyone wants to implement round 
corners on web sites these days (even gmail has em). So I am not quite so 
sure they are utterly passe. Isn't everyone tired of the same ole' boring 
square windows that come out of the box on windoze? I am. Square windows are 
utterly passe!

<snip />

I'm sure I can extend the critique if anybody is interested - and as I said
> above, this is mostly not aimed at Ben & John but at the general state of 
> the
> Squeak UI.


Agreed. We need to overhaul the Squeak UI. I still believe this is primarily 
what holds us (Squeakers) back from getting serious attention by the 
development community. Ben and I (mostly Ben) built the Look Enhancements on 
the cheap to make Squeak more pleasant to work in. We didn't want to solve 
all the problems with the Squeak UI -- just make it a place that I want to 
work in. That it has done for me and Ben. I would be happy to join others on 
revamping the Squeak UI widget set to be more modern if we could get a group 
of us working on it.

Regards,

John 

-- 
It's easy to have a complicated idea. It's very very hard to have a simple 
idea. -- Carver Mead
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