2009/6/29 Hernán Morales Durand <hernan.morales at gmail.com>:
> Dear Ian,

Hello Hernán!

>                  I really understand your position, because I hated
> the Squeak UI for almost one year, until I started to read about Color
> Theory and Cognitive Pshychology and understand some things about it.
> However, each soul has to convince by himself or do something about
> it.

There are many superficial people in this crazy world. They don't get
pass the current look-and-feel. It is unfortunate enough because they
cannot see the true beauty behind Smalltalk. The look-and-feel is not
so important to me since it's necessary to create a custom UI for our
application to be deployed, and localization, deployment facilities,
maintenance related stuff, etc. comes on top of my list. But, still,
it's good to be able to talk about these issues and understand what
the problems are.

> Color Theory and Cognitive Psychology

Squeak UI is really colourful. Bright colours are stimulating and
would be favourable to any child's development. It is however very
difficult to spend 8, 10, or more hours a day, everyday, either on a
personal project or a professional front, with such a colour scheme.

Moreover, the colours are not necessarily clearly identifying each
window or graphical component; I feel lucky that it doesn't pop up the
same tool with different colour each time. The lack of coherence in
the colour scheme makes it exhausting and serve no other purpose than
aesthetics, usability completely left aside. The lack of coherence in
the general look-and-feel is also disturbing and annoying.

Usability comes second in the list of complains from my acquaintances,
which I tried to Squeak-e-vangelize. The first obstacle is obviously
no edit-compile-cycle but we ain't gonna get it (it makes no sense at
all in Squeak). Sincerely, I think, people can get over the fact there
is no edit-compile-cycle. Then, they hit themselves to a bunch of
separated windows in contrast to an IDE, which traditionally provides
everything integrated through panes and top menus in categories.
Newcomers (or even not so new) should easily find features without
having to dig into obscure menus or, sometimes, even code. Menus are a
big mess. They're sometimes huge and the lack of organization is
problematic. The programmers not so familiar with Squeak definitively
have to understand the principle behind the workspace, transcript,
class browser, saving an image, etc. Nonetheless, the sense of being
lost in this new but exciting environment would not repulse them if
only they could find familiar elements.

>  Let me put my feelings into the words of Schoenberg, he once said :
> "Art is not for everyone; and if it is for everyone, it is not Art.".
> And I believe pretty much the same here : "Smalltalk is not for
> everyone; and if it is for everyone, then it is not Smalltalk".

It is perfectly fine if Smalltalk is not for everyone. Though, wasn't
it the initial spirit of it? Anyway, while it might not be for
everyone, it shouldn't make our own community split up and flock away.
Right? I've got the feeling the Squeak community has created a very
comfortable niche for itself and sort of forgot about the essentials.
A reality check once in a while is always good.

> Cheers,
>
> Hernán


Best regards,
Ian.

-- 
http://mecenia.blogspot.com/