[Squeakland] eToys interface showed Smalltalk object browser when clicking on inspect/eye halo button

Scott Wallace scott.wallace at squeakland.org
Tue Nov 7 05:14:12 PST 2006


Hi, Guyren,

The problem you encountered on that one machine almost certainly was  
due to that computer's "caps lock" key having been inadvertently  
pushed in.  This resulted in all mouse and keyboard interactions  
being interpreted on that machine as if the SHIFT key were being held  
down.

When the shift key is held down while certain halo handles are  
clicked, you get "alternate" halo actions.  For example, holding the  
shift key down while you click on the magenta halo handle will bring  
up a small color chooser rather than the huge graphical-properties  
sheet.

In the case of the turquoise-eye halo handle, a normal click brings  
up the normal etoy "Viewer", whereas a shift-click brings up a  
Smalltalk "Instance Browser" showing "Universal Tiles", which is what  
you saw on that computer.  I think that probably we had *all* lost  
track of the fact that that feature, a leftover from a demo by a  
colleague years ago, was still in there.  It has no relevance at all  
to current etoy users, and should be, and now will be, removed from  
the system.

Thank you!

Cheers,

   -- Scott

On Nov 6, 2006, at 8:46 PM, Guyren Howe wrote:

> Just did my first eToys group today. It went really well! After one
> hour, a dozen computers were covered with sprites moving in all kinds
> of ways, covered in turtle trails, making a huge cacophany. The
> students all did more than I expected in the time.
>
> My puzzle is this: I got there an hour before the class, and went
> round all the computers, going to the Squeakland website, and running
> the installer on each of the computers. Identical stpes on 16  
> computers.
>
> During the group, one of the students called me over. She'd been at
> the computer for five or ten minutes by this point. On this machine,
> when you click on an eToy, click on its eye/inspect halo button,
> rather than the normal eToy inspector, we got what seems to be some
> kind of smalltalk browser. I clicked around a bit, and I couldn't
> find anything in that window that would show the regular eToy
> inspector, nor any other way of bringing up the eToy inspector, nor
> what she might have done to cause this change in behavior.
>
> Comments? (cause/fix/workaround)
>
> Thanks.
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