[UI] Well, shall we do something then?

[Bill Schwab]

Todd,

Either I have been very, VERY lucky, or I have made some level of peace
with Smalltalk Processes.  A shared queue between a couple of threads
_should_ be ok.  Did you see the relatively recent messages surrounding
Delay, etc. fixes for Squeak?  I found the whole thing somewhat
unsettling, to say the least - still do.  Your problem might be that the
shared queue does not work???  Checking for patches might be a worthy
effort.  Another thing to consider is that user interfaces tend to like
changes to be injected on their main thread.  I forget the name of
Squeak's notion of a "deferred action," but I can find it later if there
is a need - I suspect you or one of our peers will be able to provide
the relevant selector name.  My primary contribution is to ask whether
you have considered it.  I tend to queue GUI updates whether they need
it or not ;)

Bill




Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D.
University of Florida
Department of Anesthesiology
PO Box 100254
Gainesville, FL 32610-0254

Email: bschwab at anest.ufl.edu
Tel: (352) 846-1285
FAX: (352) 392-7029

>>> tblanchard at mac.com 09/16/07 10:31 PM >>>

On Sep 16, 2007, at 2:12 PM, tim Rowledge wrote:

> Costumes are in my opinion one of the more useful parts of the  
> tweak design. You an change the look by changing the costume.

Perhaps - but when wanting to make a custom control - it gets unclear  
(to me anyway) whether one should subclass one or both of the player/ 
class pair.  This is the bit I expect people to get wrong often.

An example is the multi-column Mac OS X file browser -  I sat down to  
try to make one of these a couple different times and never really  
got anywhere as I kept going around and around on whether I should  
just keep the existing file chooser player, but make a new costume,  
or make a new player to go along with it.

Having once built an event based system that relied on a pair of  
threads separated by a queue - I can see how debugging things can be  
a pain as you don't have that nice stack to figure out just how you  
got here.

-Todd Blanchard