>From: "Bill Schwab" <BSchwab at anest.ufl.edu>
>Reply-To: The general-purpose Squeak developers 
>list<squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
>To: <squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
>Subject: Re: Making Squeak more accessible and used - reversing thetrend
>Date: Sat, 03 Feb 2007 19:43:11 -0500
>
>Hello all,
>
>Our goal should be to collaborate on making both approaches, and others,
>possible!  Personally, I would be thrilled with some slight pluggable
>control of Morphic's appearance, combined with a LOT of attention to
>making it feel the way they typical end user would be willing to
>tolerate.  As I have said many times, the "out of the box" look of
>Squeak has been improving from some time, but the feel is going to tank
>Squeak for anything but niche use right now - sorry, but it's true.
>Since many Squeakers appear to like the feel, fine, make that
>configurable.  We do not have to shoot each other in the foot to have
>what we each want.

I agree 100% that we should have all the approaches possible, and I thought 
that was part of my message.  In the world I envision, my image would have 
all the applications I have ever written or loaded.  But when I update one 
of the applications I support, I can click a button to package it up for 
deployment.  We could even put plug-ins to let the tool completely build 
Debian, RPM, whatever packages completely so there is only one step, 
speeding our "time to market" up even more.

And as far as look-and-feel.  I agree, I don't have a problem with how 
Squeak looks, but I would want to release my apps so that they look native 
where ever they run.  I think Squeak can already do this, but it sounds like 
a little work is needed here as well to support it easier (e.g. don't spend 
cycles building up the Squeak window if it isn't going to be used).

>From one perspective, we can use that to our respective
>personal advantages: crush the competition by having an edge.  We all
>individually found Smalltalk, so others can too.

Sure, that is very true.  It is funny reading what people like Paul Graham 
and the PS2 game company "Raw Dog" did with Lisp.  The companies that 
acquired them didn't want to use the language, so now they are vulnerable to 
the same thing occurring again.

>J.J., FWIW, the few end user apps I have seen written in Squeak all use
>SystemWindow for their top-level window.  The result is one main window
>with a Squeak-generated title bar inside the VM's main window - that's
>wrong from a user's perspective.

I wasn't suggesting that the application look like Squeak now.  I was 
pointing to Dolphin as my example.  But if we make this configurable, as you 
say, then we can have it anyway we want it.  We could even automate it so 
that the build stage selects a GUI appropriate for the target system.

For example, we could use Magritte to build the GUI, and at package build 
time, the package builder selects the Magritte for that platform (e.g. 
Magritte-Morph, Magritte-MacOSX, etc.).  Since there is no dependency on the 
other Magritte GUI generators (e.g. Magritte-Seaside) they get stripped out 
of the final image.

>That would be all the more true if your
>hint of an exodus from Windows occurs.

Well, I don't know that I would say Exodus.  I don't expect windows desktops 
drop to 0 overnight.  I would be happy if Mac and Linux picked up another 5 
or 10% a piece.

But I just mean there is a chance, and if the desktop market ever does open 
up I think we stand the best chance to get in that space before everyone 
else comes.  The Windows RAD tool space is utterly saturated.  But Linux is 
very low hanging fruit, with (for now at least) a low application market 
share.  I can't say much about Mac but I would expect it to be less 
saturated then Windows at least and higher application market share then 
Linux.

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