Fixing the look of squeak in 3.9.

stéphane ducasse ducasse at iam.unibe.ch
Sun Jun 19 09:17:21 UTC 2005


Hi john

I liked your simple approach. What I would like to see if if we can  
fix simple glitches of your style or others and use it to improve the  
squeak default look.  May be tweak will save the rest but I'm not  
sure. So I would really like to get something now instead of dreaming  
about tomorrow (that may not happen).
So what do you think about that?

Stef

>
> 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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