Agreed all around, and especially with "people can more easily adjust to new looks than to new interface behaviors. Squeak should recognize this observation and provide users with their expected behaviors where possible."

Bill

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

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

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hmm@heeg.de 10/14/07 3:22 PM >>>

Gary Chambers schrieb:

After incorporating the "double-click-title-bar" thing I was wondering

if

these kind of events/actions should be themed too...

Easy enough to do (think, a particular theme might "shade" the window instead, or minimize, or whatever.

In generally it would mean that the feel could be themed along with

the

look. Does anyone think that the "feel" part should be broken out for

a

mix-and-match approach, or would that be too confusing?

It should definitely be broken out. That would allow us to have feels which are consistent with user's expectations on their native platforms, while still being able to switch between different looks. For example, standard keyboard binding conventions vary between the Windows world (where ctrl- is often used) and the Mac world (where the default command key is the apple or clover key which maps to the Alt key on PC keyboards). With every major release of their operating systems Microsoft and Apple do essentially the same: Looks may be changed radically or subtly, but feel is much more stable and evolves in smaller steps. Apparently people can more easily adjust to new looks than to new interface behaviors. Squeak should recognize this observation and provide users with their expected behaviors where possible.

Other possible feel-dependent behaviors could be: - text and list selection (Windows vs Rest-of-World) - mouse button bindings (including the paste via middle mouse button found in X) - pop-up menu behavior (I kinda liked the old ST-80 pop up menus with their selection memory - I'm probably the only one who would admit that...) - keyboard focus behavior is probably orthogonal to other feel elements, but belongs into this category, too.

It might be helpful to view a "theme" as a composition of look and feel elements. That way, we could have predefined "tinymellow", "fruit" and "kobold" themes (to avoid trademark infringements :-) ) and user-defined combinations of looks and feels (for example, a secret GNU admirer in a microsoft workplace might choose a "kobold" look with the "tinymellow" feel.)

Cheers, Hans-Martin _______________________________________________ UI mailing list UI@lists.squeakfoundation.org http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/ui