> On 17-05-2018, at 2:40 PM, Chris Muller <asqueaker at gmail.com> wrote:
> New users' first experience upon launching Squeak should be an
> immediate commencement of their journey to discovery and wonderment,
> not a tedious and meaningless (to them) message that tasks
> them with some chore they couldn't possibly care about at that point.

I have to disagree there; I wouldn't consider it tedious nor meaningless. It's a single dialogue action and an educational moment.

> Many would bail right then and there.  Personally, I think most users
> that would use a system like this would know about files and folders

And yet decades of experience of people with little experience trying out Smalltalk systems suggests otherwise to me. Think of it like opening a template document in a word processor.

> and would simply re-unzip it, but if you feel strongly the system
> should hold their hand then lets actually hold it by handling it for
> the user *automatically*.   A tweak to the launcher scripts included
> in the All-In-One.  Simply change the script to make a copy of the
> "master" and then launch the copy.  If  the copy already exists (i.e.,
> from last time), launch it instead of copying it over.  Then, we
> simply include a "factory-reset" script which deletes the copy.  Done.

That would be a perfectly fine approach too. It does prevent the user choosing a name, but that may be positive or negative. It could be implemented in the image rather than us having to write shell equivalent scripts for several systems. Then again, we likley need to do that anyway to cater for 32/64 bit stuff.


tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Useful random insult:- S  p  a  c  e  d   o  u  t .