-----Original Message----- From: ui-bounces@lists.squeakfoundation.org [mailto:ui-bounces@lists.squeakfoundation.org]On Behalf Of Juan Vuletich Sent: 16 April 2008 7:26 AM To: Squeak's User Interface Subject: Re: [UI] Summary

Hi folks,

I'm sure my site is not updated often, and there's a lot to elaborate there, but anyway. What does "suffering from entropy" mean?

Just that some of the graphics for the "tabs" near the top of the page seem to be missing for me.

Glad you're still working on things :-)

Gary

Cheers, Juan Vuletich

Gary Chambers wrote:

...

Just to summarise what we should be looking at (IMHO):

Alain Plantec's Miro http://www.squeaksource.com/Miro/ Juan Vuletich

http://www.jvuletich.org/Morphic3/TheFutureOfTheGUI_01.html

...

(the site appears to be suffering from entropy...) Sig's OpenGL canvas (can be Googled, will let Sig let us know...) The SqueakGTK project http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6043 (older: http://www.squeaksource.com/Gtk/) Areithfa Ffenestri http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/3862

The dev thread on "menu standards"

http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2008-April/

127706.htm

l (is "underthreaded" as I like to consider things, so not too visible on web-based-thread feeds)

Worth a look at the dev thread on SeasideXUL too...

http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2008-April/127757.htm

l

Any omissions (have probably forgot one or two myself) welcome to be added...

Regards, Gary.

---

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On Sat, Apr 19, 2008 at 1:46 PM, Michael Davies mykdavies+squeak@gmail.com wrote:

It might also be worth finding out some more about Gilad Bracha's work on Newspeak. He's got a very slick interface built on top of Squeak, using two frameworks - "Brazil" widget framework and "Hopscotch" application framework. He discussed them briefly in passing during the talk linked to at http://news.squeak.org/2008/04/19/video-of-newspeak-lecture-now-available/

• I think he's still working to persuade the sponsors to allow the

code to be open-sourced, but there may be a useful discussion to be had in the meantime.

I'll be happy to de-lurk and tell more Brazil and Hopscotch. What would you like to find out? I'll give a talk specifically about those frameworks at Smalltalk Solutions this June and possibly elsewhere sometime later.

But to have the expectations right from the start--you have to realize that Brazil and Hopscotch are frameworks for and in Newspeak. Squeak is a host at the moment and Morphic is treated by Brazil as one of the native UIs it maps to, but you can't just transplant the frameworks into a Squeak image. Also, while Squeak is a host at the moment, it does not have to stay this way forever.

At the moment, interoperability between the two languages is possible, but it is not a goal in itself. A plain Squeak program in the same image could build a Brazil UI. Hopscoth, on the other hand, is definitely best used in Newspeak. I expect that after my next redesign it will become even more Newspeak-specific. That is to say, I myself am not sure how directly useful both are for the future of Squeak UI. (And then if you ask me, I don't think that the biggest problem with the Squeak UI is dearth of UI frameworks, much as I believe that Brazil and Hopscotch are The Right Thing :).

Cheers,

--Vassili

Hi Michael,

On Sun, Apr 20, 2008 at 5:38 AM, Michael Davies mykdavies+squeak@gmail.com wrote:

What are your usage scenarios for Newspeak that are making UI development a priority at such an early stage in the development of the language?

Gilad mentioned at various points in the talk that Newspeak exists in the context of a larger application project. This was the reason why development started with Squeak and not as "come back in two years and we'll have a platform for you", and also why there was the need for a GUI early on. Plus of course, it was clear from the start that the classic Smalltalk browser model was not scalable enough for nested classes, so without a UI story it would be life with source files in Emacs.

Could you explain the relationship between Brazil and Hopscotch, and the division of responsibilities between them?

Brazil could be described as an abstract widget and layout framework. Abstract because the objects you normally work with as the framework user are some generic constructs materialized behind the scenes as artifacts of the host OS UI. (Morphic is also treated as a host UI, and the browser you saw in the demo was in fact made of morphs even though it wasn't coded in Morphic). As an example, a Brazil Button has attributes such as the label, the enabled/disabled state, and the action to invoke when it is pressed. When its container window opens in Morphic, you get a SystemWindow morph a SimpleButtonMorph inside. When the same window opens in Windows, you get a native window with a native Windows button control in it. A UI can be dynamically unmapped from one host and remapped to the other, retaining any important state. This makes a neat demo, but is also pretty much a requirement if you want to support image-based development and allow saving an image on one OS and opening it on another.

Brazil also manages widget layout, using what's essentially a capability-based model, which is interesting but best explained separately. The layout is always computed by Brazil, be it in Windows which has no layout mechanism of its own or in Morphic which does.

Hopscotch is the application framework and the browser. I myself make no distinction between the two--at least not to the point of coming up with separate names--as I've been working on the framework and the browser together from the start. But strictly speaking they are two separate things, Hopscotch-the-framework and Hopscotch-the-browser.

The purpose of the framework is to allow expressing and managing assemblies of widgets that serve a particular purpose. The purpose is usually to present and manipulate some domain objects, so the framework is essentially domain-UI glue plus some common UI tools such as the document model and navigation facilities. That's kind of it in the most general sense. There are various interesting points about the way Hopscotch does it, and I plan to eventually tell about it in detail on my blog and other venues, but it's a little too early yet. But one interesting point is that similar to how Brazil UIs can manifest themselves as widgets of different host systems, a Hopscotch application could be rendered by an underlying widget layer other than Brazil. For example, it would be possible to run Hopscotch (the browser/IDE) in a web browser by teaching Hopscotch (the framework) how to represent itself as ajaxy html. For now this is only a possibility, but the architecture has hooks to allow things like that.

Cheers,

--Vassili

Looks like exactly the kind of thing I envisaged, though with a possible mix-n-match approach to the ui construction with fallback options for unavailable targets.

Gary.

-----Original Message----- From: ui-bounces@lists.squeakfoundation.org [mailto:ui-bounces@lists.squeakfoundation.org]On Behalf Of Michael Davies Sent: 22 April 2008 6:42 PM To: Squeak's User Interface Subject: Re: [UI] Summary

Thanks for the detailed response Vassili. There's lots of interesting stuff in there, and as you say, the ability to dynamically re-map the UI onto different host environments must make for a very impressive demo!

I look forward to seeing future updates to your blog on this topic (http://blog.3plus4.org/ right?).

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