Hi all,
I spent yesterday evening demo'ing Squeak to a fellow who works with EdUbuntu and OLPC since he wanted to write his educational software in Squeak to save space on the laptop. His kids were there and really got into it after some of the capabilities were made more obvious.
I got some great feedback, and it's always cool for me to show off Squeak games (the RTS that Eddie Cottongim made years ago is perhaps the best of the non-EToys style) and coding to kids, since I don't regularly work with them and most developers are such sticks-in-the- mud about the weird UI.
Anyway, it occurred to me that just a little bit of effort in the UI design department would quickly improve Squeak's draw. Since I know the SqueakMap package loader and it's Squeak's gateway to the community for newbies as they start up Squeak (or should be), I started there.
I've added some buttons to a toolbar at the top and stole MessageNames' search bar to be more clear about the UI.
Current Screenshot (doesn't reflect help-balloon cleanups): http://briantrice.com/Images/Squeak/SMLoader1.jpeg With a filter on: http://briantrice.com/Images/Squeak/SMLoader1Filtered.jpeg
These are only incremental changes, since I don't want to take on a huge-scope project, and don't own this and other packages, so a huge fork would be politically difficult. The best application code I found for Morphic UI was actually the IRC client, although it is a bit spec-heavy.
What do people think of this idea? Particularly the package owners, like Göran, but also whoever is "in charge" of the overall UI face of Squeak (that is, whoever would complain loudest if I wanted to totally re-arrange the world menus).
Also, which projects make this kind of effort obsolete or easier? I know about and like the Services/Commands framework and UI, and Tweak's menubar system, but don't know what they seek to replace. What I don't know is whether there is a simple menu-bar or other such system for easily setting up some shared-styled UI features that get the salient features right in front of the user instead of burying them in context menus.
Okay, I'll stop here for now. Feedback welcome!
-- -Brian http://briantrice.com