[Newbie] - Building a Morphic UI

Frank Urbach frank.urbach at schmees.com
Fri Feb 24 12:10:29 UTC 2006


Hi Dugald!

Have look at Tweak. 
http://tweak.impara.de

There you have some widgets you are searching for. The technology of islands keep the widgets together. The halos of the widgets can hidden programmaticly or set by color-tool. So destroying of the UI will prevent by these things.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
Frank

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [Newbie] - Building a Morphic UI (24-Feb-2006 12:47)
From:    Dugald Wilson <dwilson at cad-schroer.co.uk>
To:      frank.urbach at schmees.com

> Hi to all.
> 
> I have played around with Squeak but not really seriously until now. 
> Even my 7 year old has been playing with it for the last 2 years!  My 12 
> year old has toyed with the Morphic programming bits.
> 
> However, I have a VisualWorks ST app that I want to translate to Squeak, 
> more as an exercise in learning to develop UIs in Squeak.  The real 
> code, of which there is a lot, is fairly easy to translate, and this has 
> been done mostly.  The UI remains the problem: I need radio buttons, 
> scaled graphics, mouse interaction etc..
> 
> Several things...
> 
> 1. Building a real UI seems so, so hard, especially if you want it to 
> look "professional" rather than "string and sealing wax".  Is there no 
> UI builder?  Does everyone roll their own UI?  This hinders all attempts 
> at rapid prototyping.
> 
> 2. While old Squeakers might be happy about this, I do not think it 
> useful or advisable for the app user to be able to dismantle the UI 
> using halos, selecting UI components and spreading them around the 
> screen.  This, I find, is the most unsatisfactory part of the basic 
> Squeak system UI: it's too easy to destroy it.
> 
> 3. Although the AlignmentMorph is "on the way out", it seems quite a 
> good idea to help in grouping items in find of frames.  LayoutPolicy 
> doesn't seem to do the same work in resizing, shrinkwrapping, spacing...
> 
> 4. In the SystemWindow how do you change the colour of the title bar, 
> short of doing a treewalk through all the submorphs to set their colour 
> individually?
> 
> An answer to these issues would, I suppose, be to subclass all the 
> components I need for my UI to provide reasonable default behaviour. 
> This would be building my own UI system from the very bottom upwards - a 
> task I would rather not do.  There must be a better way - surely.
> 
> I have not found much documentation to help.  I'm using Mark Guzdial's 
> book as a guide but it's old - Squeak 2.7.  Otherwise it's just 
> scavenging in the Browser.
> 
> Hmmph!
> 
> I'm sure that the second time (if there is one) it should be quicker.
> 
> -- 
> Dugald Wilson
> 





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