[squeak-dev] More pluggable dialog fun (was Re: FileChooser/SaverDialog)

tim Rowledge tim at rowledge.org
Sun Nov 5 01:04:44 UTC 2017


> On 04-11-2017, at 5:47 PM, Bob Arning <arning315 at comcast.net> wrote:
> 
> My hunch is that one major way things are made simple and intelligible is by limiting the choices available. Increasing the choices available probably probably comes at the expense of simplicity.

Yup. The trick is to find a way for the simple to use tool to do the things you need. Which if you think about it is pretty much the major job of engineering.

> I can look in the image and see what the things ToolBuilder is currently doing reasonably well, but I get no sense of how far it was intended to go. Is it for building tools? What is a tool? Is a fileChooser a tool? Is a spreadsheet a tool? How about Photoshop?

Just imagine if it had been nicely documented…

> Seems like you draw a line somewhere and say things on the left belong to TB and things on the right are done another way. OR, you say the goal of TB is to manage the creation of every pixel on the screen. I'm wondering if your fileChooser is perhaps to the right of a plausibly drawn line. Hard to answer that without knowing what the fileChooser ends up being.

I think I want to see the toolbuilder able to handle all the widgets that seem sensible for building applications; so not an entire photoshop UI perhaps but certainly file loading/saving dialogs, choices for this and that. I suppose one wouldn’t expect to include complex image processing specific widgets necessarily but it ought to be possible to add them if you want.

One of the nice aspects of toolbuilder is the way it provides clear widget options - ask for a button and you get a button without having to check out every damn button related morph class - did you know there are *40* classes with ‘button’ in the name?


> One approach would be to get it working to your satisfaction in Morphic and then ask the question of how much TB would need to change to take over the job. Make it work then make it right, ya know?

Point.


tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Never forget: 2 + 2 = 5 for extremely large values of 2.




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