Hi Chris,

nice to see that we are on a good way to release Squeak 4.5. Many bug fixes,
many code cleanups... and some not that "polished" new features there. :)

Let me explain my concern with those "Smart Pane Splitters". Automatic,
content-aware layouting is a nice idea and many applications out there try
to minimize the time that users have to spend for just organizing
information on screen. Despite all efforts that go into those neat
approaches, we still need to follow up on some basic usability heuristics.

You do not want to slow the user down. Users will accommodate to the pace of
the interface. Having to wait some seconds until the layout manager got its
work done is not acceptable. This is something even expert users cannot
optimize (besides turning that feature off at all). Such layouting is a very
frequent action that has to complete as fast as possible. At most 100ms I
suppose. (Would have to look up for some response time models such as that
from Ben Shneiderman).

I think that predictability of user interactions is even more important.
This layout algorithm (and the way you can watch it work) seems
unpredictable. Even random. You try to think about what the user wants to
see in, for example, the system browser but you actually have no idea
whether pane resizing is an issue for the particular programming task at
all. In these situations, this layouting gets in the way of users'
productivity.

I appreaciate the work that you have done here but this feature of having
"Smart Pane Splitters" is not ready to be released and needs more rethinking
from a usability perspective: What are the benefits? What are the
liabilities? Is it for experts only? Is it for novices only? What is the
actual (killer) use case where such a feature can support the programmer?

I do not just vote for turning off the preference by default but for
removing its code from the 4.5 image and provide a simple Metacello-Script
for loading aftewards. :)

Best,
Marcel



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