Look/feel improvements (was Re: Smalltalk: Requiem or Resurgence?
{Dr. Dobb's Journal (05/06/06) Chan, Jeremy})
tim Rowledge
tim at rowledge.org
Fri May 12 03:02:04 UTC 2006
On 11-May-06, at 7:18 PM, Todd Blanchard wrote:
> I agree - it would be cool if the community could pony up for a
> really good visual designer to design a slick "look" for the
> environment.
While the visual stuff is certainly important to initial perception
we mustn't forget the feel half of look&feel. That is something that
*does* need engineer type effort.
My current pet peeve on 'feel' is the abysmal feedback provided (or
rather not provided) by buttons and lists. When you click a button or
a list item something visible should happen *immediately* to show
that the press/click has been picked up. This is an attribute of the
widget, not the application using it by the way. The application
handling the press/click should also provide some visual feedback if
there is any delay whatsoever in responding; it takes time to query
sockets, open files, read data, whatever and if you're left hanging
while that goes on you can end up stuffing the event queue with
spurious events. My favourite example is using a remote MC
repository. Click on a package. Wait (reasonably - it's going to
Germany from Canada and those little nano-pigeons can only swim down
the wire so fast). No feedback. Hmm, did my click actually select the
package or merely move the focus to the MC browser window? Or even
just move focus to the Squeak window from some other app? How long do
I wait before clicking again - and finding that I've just deselected
the package that is just being displayed! Arrgh!
We have a pretty decent progress bar facility that needs to be used a
lot more. It would also be useful to extend it so that it would have
a small delay before appearing - say 1/3rd sec - so that operations
that complete 'nearly instantly' don't clutter ones perception
needlessly. RISC OS started doing something like this in around '88
and it can be very simple to use and helpful to users. For operations
of indeterminable length a progress bar that regularly updates in
some 'fuzzy' fashion would be nice. It would at least let the user
know that something is going on and the system hasn't locked up! The
old Perq workstation window system used to do some thing vaguely like
those random-block page transitions so beloved of powerpoint abusers.
One could even use the same feedback provide by the project loader
with the bar moving back and forth like a Cylon eye.
So my suggested plan would be to
a) improve the button list immediate feedback
b) improve and extend the progress bar
c) make use of the progress bar in (many) more places
Then it might be worth spending time or money to improve the visuals.
tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
World Ends at Ten! Pictures at 11 on Fox News!
More information about the Squeak-dev
mailing list
|