<br>
<div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Now, as for look and feel stuff for Squeak, the suggested LookEnhancments-jrp.<br>12 is quite reasonable as a small but definite improvement. I certainly prefer
<br>the black text on white background. A lot of the following commentary is not<br>specifically the 'fault' of the suggested improvements, so please don't think<br>I'm blaming Ben & John.</blockquote><div><br>
Keep in mind that we worked up these look enhancements to meet the following critieria:<br>
<br>
1. Stay within the current SystemWindow framework and, as such, we did
not focus on addressing problems with all the UI widgets and we did not
focus on makiing a complete overhaul to the visual style.<br>
2. Make a few high impact changes to give a new look and feel while
modifyng the least amount of code since we were modifying SystemWindow
and other Morphic objects.<br>
</div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">The window frame is ok in general.<br><br>I'm not convinced by the very flat appearance of the frame buttons,
<br>particularly not by the ugly grey circle that appears when you press them. I'd<br>also point out that the 'collapse circle' is really ugly; a decently anti-<br>aliased one ought to be easy to cache. In general something supposed to be a
<br>button ought to have some visual separation from its background. It should have<br>a clearly different but related appearance while it is pushed.</blockquote><div><br>
This is already built into squeak. We only turned "alternativeWindowBoxesLook" off in preferences.<br>
</div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">The inner frames are too thick in my opinion and rather intrusive. I'd say make<br>
them thinner and mark the divider-mover part with a dark line rather than<br>making the whole thing thick enough to fit a dot inside. There is an old and<br>very annoying problem with the divider stuff in that the cursor changes and
<br>seems to jam up the UI - an artifact of uncompleted event driven changes I<br>suspect. I suggest the divider should have movability only in a marked place<br>(the centre, normally) and not along its entire length. I'll note in passing
<br>that morphic produces divider behaviour at the top of the 'instance|?|class'<br>buttons as well even though no visual divider exists. Nasty.</blockquote><div><br>
I think these are mostly issues with SystemWindow. The divider behavior
is actually quite intertwined in SystemWindow and hard to modify. We
did make the dividers 6 pixels wide. If that is too wide, I suspect we
could ultimately make them 3 pixels with a 1 pixel divider handle in
the middle. I would have to explore the implications of usability.<br>
</div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Window resizing handles - nicer than assumed ones all over the place. More<br>clear difference to the divider handles would be good. The performance when
<br>resizing is appalling on my machine, suggesting some optimisation would be<br>beneficial. One UI facility I find useful on RISC OS when risiezing is that if<br>you drag the resize handles to/past the edge of the screen, the topleft moves
<br>up & left so the window can grow.</blockquote><div><br>
Again, these are mostly comments about SystemWindow in general. I agree
in general. The divider handles which dub as our resizing handles I've
kind of grown attached to, but there are a lot of different styles one
could imaging if we just had a more versitle theme engine built into
Squeak.<br>
</div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Window moving. Morphic seems to assume that if you grab something in a place<br>that does nothing else you obviously want to move it. I really hate that for
<br>windows. Especially since there seem to be small but too-easily touchable<br>places in every window.</blockquote><div><br>
Agreed.<br>
</div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Roundedcorners. Yuck. So utterly passe and kindergarten-winXP.</blockquote><div><br>
This one is quite interesting. Seems that everyone wants to implement
round corners on web sites these days (even gmail has em). So I am not
quite so sure they are utterly passe. Isn't everyone tired of the same
ole' boring square windows that come out of the box on windoze? I am.
Square windows are utterly passe!<br>
</div><br><snip /><br>
<div><br>
</div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">I'm sure I can extend the critique if anybody is interested - and as I said<br>above, this is mostly not aimed at Ben & John but at the general state of the
<br>Squeak UI.</blockquote><div><br>
Agreed. We need to overhaul the Squeak UI. I still believe this is
primarily what holds us (Squeakers) back from getting serious attention
by the development community. Ben and I (mostly Ben) built the Look
Enhancements on the cheap to make Squeak more pleasant to work in. We
didn't want to solve all the problems with the Squeak UI -- just make
it a place that I want to work in. That it has done for me and Ben. I
would be happy to join others on revamping the Squeak UI widget set to
be more modern if we could get a group of us working on it.<br>
<br>
Regards,<br>
<br>
John </div></div><br>-- <br>It's easy to have a complicated idea. It's very very hard to have a simple idea. -- Carver Mead