Thank you.

At the present time the "upgrade" consists of a fair few MC packages. I have
had to make the methods rather more resilient then necessay to avoid
problems with Monticello loading (not quite atomic yet). As I said, if there
is interest it may be worth creating a unified package.

There are some, perhaps significant, changes to some of the fundamental
methods in Morphic that could potentially break other packages, though I
have tested as many as possible and tried to minimise any adverse effects.

Most changes to existing classes are due to a wish to have the development
enviroment benefit from the enhancements.

Some of the changes may slow things down, while others provide a boost to
counteract that!

It will be interesting to see how Morphic evolves which may lead to
requiring fewer workarounds!

At present, with separate packages, it is possible to pick-and-choose the
enhancements that a user requires, at the expense of a few conditional
method invocations.

I have tried to work mostly *with* Morphic in terms of implementing the
"themes", as in using what Morphic provides (in terms of borders, fillStyles
etc) rather than going down the subclassed-morph approach. This does mean
that the themes are a little limited, though the plus-side is better
integration within the Squeak environment.

In terms of fonts, Strike, TTC (why the 'C'?) and Freetype are supported. In
fact, whatever works in the current environment.

There are major fixes to the window corner grips, splitters and title-bar
size handling that should make people happier.
In particular, there are many changes to various morphs to determine their
proper minimum extent with regard to various layout policies. These may
cause a problem to some packages, though I feel I have implemented them in
the way that they were originally intended.

As I remarked in an earlier post, we are committed to ensuring these changes
move forward *with* Squeak, although it would be nice (easier) if some of
the changes could be incorporated. It is not as simple as providing a fix to
an existing Mantis bug.. (I hope this doesn't put you off!).

At present the packages have a "Pinesoft" prefix. That can be changed if
incorporation is required. We would like to give this back to the community
that has supported us.

I have added some preferences to allow various levels of involvement with
the modifications and, at present there are three themes to choose from:
"StandardSqueak" (mostly like you will be used to); "SoftSqueak"; Vistary
(as in the screen shot).

The Taskbar can be enabled via preference and is themed along with theming
of the WorldMainDockingBar.
Yet to do is providing preference browser based setting of the
colour/fillstyles used in the UI, though this can be done through code at
present.

I welcome any feedback.

Gary

-----Original Message-----
From: squeak-dev-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org
[mailto:squeak-dev-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org] On Behalf Of Andreas
Wacknitz
Sent: 12 July 2007 8:09 pm
To: 'The general-purpose Squeak developers list'
Subject: Re: A couple of simple ergonomic adjustments




> And some not-so-simple ergonomic adjustments ;-)

> A piccy of my Squeak desktop along with one of our applications.

>  http://www.flickr.com/photos/65338133@N00/789894614/

> Nearly ready to release into the community as an add-on package (minus 
> the report builder), though does modify (fix) quite a bit of morphic 
> too.

> Uses the FreetypePlus package (good work Andy!).

> Supports a few different "themes", including one that looks more like 
> "standard" squeak. Provides a nice UI for some standard (business 
> application like) services, choosing colours, selecting a font etc.
> Also provides a framework for creating "standard" morphs (checkboxes,
> drop-lists etc).

> If there's any interest I'll speed up getting it ready for release.

This looks rather promising. Many new Squeakers ask for common controls. The
lack of standard GUI elements is a show stopper for many. With your work
Squeak will be even more interesting. I can't wait to get my hands on it ;-)

Regards
Andreas