On 3/29/02 7:06 PM, "Norton, Chris" chrisn@Kronos.com wrote:
If you look at the Swiki, you'll see lots of cool screenshots of Squeak-tweaks that people have done over the years. Unfortunately, most of these tweaks never got past the "ain't it cool" stage. The really hard part of any project is to find someone who will stay the course and finish it.
Chris, you are correct. The work to do this is not a one day job. However, I can tell you, as one of the folks that have done it once, the really hard parts are:
1. To apply a "look" across the board requires changes to a lot of classes in the tools themselves. At this point it's still needing of additional refactoring. And the work to do that AND to the "look" can be overwhelming.
2. I never really ever heard positive feedback to finish the work from anyone other than the "newbies". It could just be me, but it felt like getting "skins" or "themes" or the work that Jim Benson had been doing (what do you call that stuff nowadays Jim?) was looked upon as a waste of time by the more senior Squeakers out there. It was hard to get "Buy-in" on the work and, in my case since the skins project was just my way of learning about drawing things for the first time in Morphic (I was heavy into MVC prior to that project), it was no longer worth the effort. I gave up and went on to other things. When you make a major change to the product you have to have some level of support for the base factorings you need or you'll end up constantly in software maintenance mode.
I agree with the sentiment that a sexy look is good marketing. I truly believe that. When a product is a pleasure to look at people want to know more about it. In the case of Smalltalk, after they hopefully see the lightness of the language and depth of the class hierarchy they will be hooked.
- Steve