[Squeakland] New to Squeak - problems I'm having

[Bert Freudenberg]

Am 01.10.2005 um 07:38 schrieb Mark Engelberg:

> OK, last night I was surfing the web and discovered Squeak.  I
> installed the Squeak plug-in (on Windows XP Professional, in Mozilla
> Firefox 1.0.7), so that I could begin looking at the various
> tutorials.

Welcome!

> Here are some of the problems I've already encountered:
>
> First, when clicking on the supplies tab at the bottom of the screen,
> two rows of icons pop up.  The bottom row is about two-thirds off the
> screen, making the icons difficult to recognize.

Yes, we have the wrong default height in this "flap" - but nobody has  
filed a bug report yet so we always forget to change it ;-)

You can manually drag the flap out a bit further (grab the tab and  
move it around).

> Second, when viewing several of the tutorials, many weird characters
> seemed to be substituted for ordinary characters.  For example, the
> dash character "-" was replaced by a capital N with a bar over it.
>
> Third, whenever a window of text was formatted in a narrow column with
> something to the right of it, the right edge of the text (about one
> letter's worth) was cut off.
>
> Fourth, in all of the tutorials containing a mixture of icons and
> text, the icons were not located in the space allocated for them by
> the text.  They were always shifted a bit.  Furthermore, if you tried
> to drag them into the space allocated by the text, the icon wouldn't
> quite fit (as if the text were a bit too small, or the icon a bit too
> big).

All of these problems come from the recent switch to Unicode text -  
we have different fonts etc. This is only a problem for old content,  
the stuff that you make now should be fine.

> Anyway, I like everything I've read so far about the promising
> features of this language for kids, but these user interface issues
> made a poor first impression.  Can anyone tell me what's going wrong
> and how to fix it?

We have worked pretty hard to make sure you can actually load and see  
the older projects (if this does not work, please report this).  
Making each one pretty, though, requires manual work (loading,  
editing, saving). AFAIK nobody is working on that currently. We  
wouldn't mind being sent fixed projects, though ;-)

- Bert -