[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
>
More information about the Squeak-dev
mailing list
|