---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Andreas Wacknitz <A.Wacknitz at gmx.de>
Date: 31 May 2011 08:18
Subject: [Pharo-project] usability of Pharo and Squeak
To: Pharo-project at lists.gforge.inria.fr


Hi all,

I have convinced a friend to take a closer look at Pharo 1.2.1 and
Dolphin Smalltalk. He is an experienced Java developer.
After some time he started to complain about Pharo. I was discussing
with him and now think that he has some valid points.

His biggest complaint is: "Why does Pharo always show windows at sizes
and positions I don't want?"
I answered him: You could set the standard window size in the class
RealEstateAgent and furthermore you can create or change
>>initialExtent methods in every class that is involved.
But his answer was: Why should I do that? It's the responsibility of
an IDE. I don't want to program elementary things of my IDE. Why is
there no mechanism that let a user set the sizes and positions of
windows? Netbeans and Eclipse are doing that nicely. Why isn't it
possible in Pharo?
After that discussion I now question my own way of using Pharo and
Squeak. I have created some changesets that I used to file in when
using
a fresh image. But that seems stupid now...

His second complaint was that he doesn't like the cluttered windows.
While programming he had a lot of open windows and told me that he
lost overview.
Especially in Pharo he is complaining about minimized windows that are
hard to distinguish. He better likes Dolphin with tabbed windows that
are common in other IDE's.


Regards
Andreas