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.
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.
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).
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?
Thanks,
Mark Engelberg
On Fri, 30 Sep 2005 22:38:16 -0700, Mark Engelberg mark.engelberg@gmail.com wrote:
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.
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.
You can drag it to see the rest of the row. That took a while to figure out. I think it's supposed to pop-out fully visible.
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).
Yeah, I've seen all those same things. I never could figure out why/how to fix.
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 -
squeakland@lists.squeakfoundation.org
-
Bert Freudenberg -
Blake -
Mark Engelberg