Lukas,
Gary provided the authoritative answer, to which I will add that a stray method to set the various preferences might be helpful. We will all have our own variants, but it is getting hard to tell which options are not truly independent. FWIW, it is a great problem to have.
As far as keyboard focus being off topic: it is **ON TOPIC**. I wish you guys could have heard Aileen type. Failing that, watch a clerk who has learned how to work without a mouse (and hates having to stop to touch it) pound on a keyboard. We should be able to meet their expectations.
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
renggli@gmail.com 01/30/08 7:52 AM >>>
Of course, the context menu for taskbar buttons is only available if
the existing "generalizedYellowButtonMenu" preference is switched off (don't ask why!).
As for window switching, alt-leftArrow/alt-rightArrow was the only
combination I could find that wouldn't conflict with (mostly text) morphs and the host OS.
All described here http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6005
This is really cool. Thanks for the pointers.
Even if this is getting more and more off-topic, what would it take to get the focus detached from the mouse?
Lukas
The following is from a different subject but I find it more appropriate for the "Promote Squeak/Smalltalk" thread:
Bill Schwab schrieb:
Lukas,
Gary provided the authoritative answer, to which I will add that a stray method to set the various preferences might be helpful. We will all have our own variants, but it is getting hard to tell which options are not truly independent. FWIW, it is a great problem to have.
As far as keyboard focus being off topic: it is **ON TOPIC**. I wish you guys could have heard Aileen type. Failing that, watch a clerk who has learned how to work without a mouse (and hates having to stop to touch it) pound on a keyboard. We should be able to meet their expectations.
Meeting expectations is a good catchword. And to make a long story short: Squeak is often advertised as being "multi platform" and having a decent class library. In my experience the reality is different: Windows is supported best, followed by Mac and Linux x86. Every other platform has more or less problems: - On Solaris (x86 and SPARC): FFI is not supported and thus no depending packages like ODBC (so no generic database connectivity). - Are there any actual VMs and images for ARM, MIPS or something similar? - What about Linux on non-Intel?
Another, often discussed problem area for Squeak is its not standard conforming GUI. It may be that Morphic is in many areas superior to most other GUI frameworks. Nevertheless it is very difficult and annoying to create GUIs for standard business applications (eg. the aforementioned bank account SW).
Code quality and documentation is another major concern. There is a lot of brilliant code in the Squeak base. But there is also a lot of mess in it. And you can be sure that most experienced programmers will find many more occurrences of mess than brilliant code. At least the mess is more likely to be remembered. Furthermore it is quite easy to find problems and annoyances in the tools of a standard image. (BTW I have similar experiences with ST/X. It takes only a few minutes to find MNUs in the standard tools.)
Did I mention that Squeak is sometimes painfully slow on my Sun Blade 2000 (equipped with two US-III+ processors and 8GB RAM)? This has two causes: gcc produces slow code for SPARC (and Sun C and its tool chain is not quite supported) and Morphic (or at least most of Squeak's GUI) is painfully slow.
Regards Andreas
On 30-Jan-08, at 1:20 PM, Andreas Wacknitz wrote:
- Are there any actual VMs and images for ARM, MIPS or something
similar?
Why do you think a special image is needed? I've supported Smalltalk in various forms on RISC OS (the original ARM supporting OS) for 20 years and can assure you no special image has ever been needed for any particular processor. It's the OS that makes the difference - assuming vaguely decent C development tools - and then only really to the VM. Barring of course small matters in FFI type image support.
If you have a machine with a functioning processor and an SDK that can compile a VM then you can make Squeak run on it. How do you think we got Squeak running on non-Mac machines in the first place?
- What about Linux on non-Intel?
What about it? Certainly Ian P. used to run a PPC laptop with linux and Squeak. I worked on a linux/ARM machine for one job.
Not to mention that realistically speaking there are only two CPU architectures that matter these days - intel-x86-descended-whatever and ARM. Pretty much everything else is now minor niche market. Cell might possibly become important sometime.
Another, often discussed problem area for Squeak is its not standard conforming GUI.
Which standard do you want? There's rather a lot of them, most awful. Win3.0? Win 3.1? 95? XP. please, not Vista.... Mac OS-7.6? 9.1? OSX 10.1/2/3/4/5? TWM? Gnome? KDE? Any of them could be implemented if people actually wanted them enough to pay for the work.
tim -- tim Rowledge; tim@rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim Useful random insult:- He has a tenuous grip on the obvious.
tim Rowledge schrieb:
On 30-Jan-08, at 1:20 PM, Andreas Wacknitz wrote:
- Are there any actual VMs and images for ARM, MIPS or something
similar?
Why do you think a special image is needed? I've supported Smalltalk in various forms on RISC OS (the original ARM supporting OS) for 20 years and can assure you no special image has ever been needed for any particular processor. It's the OS that makes the difference - assuming vaguely decent C development tools - and then only really to the VM. Barring of course small matters in FFI type image support.
I wanted to point out that there is a mismatch between "We have many supported platforms and a rich class library / many packages" and the ability to use all of the functionality on these platforms. I only managed to get ODBC running on Windows. Thus all other platforms, especially Mac and Solaris have no generic database support.
If you have a machine with a functioning processor and an SDK that can compile a VM then you can make Squeak run on it. How do you think we got Squeak running on non-Mac machines in the first place?
I know that this is possible. But if we are talking about attraction for Squeak to new developers it doesn't sound so good to say: "You can always port it to your platform or pay for a port" when a JVM is available for free and frameworks like JDBC and Hibernate.
- What about Linux on non-Intel?
What about it? Certainly Ian P. used to run a PPC laptop with linux and Squeak. I worked on a linux/ARM machine for one job.
Not to mention that realistically speaking there are only two CPU architectures that matter these days - intel-x86-descended-whatever and ARM. Pretty much everything else is now minor niche market. Cell might possibly become important sometime.
Sorry, I have a different opinion here as I own two SPARC workstations. When your argument is valid, there were also only a few programming languages relevant these days: C, C++, C# and Java. All others are just minor niche. Albeit Ruby may become important sometime.
Another, often discussed problem area for Squeak is its not standard conforming GUI.
Which standard do you want? There's rather a lot of them, most awful. Win3.0? Win 3.1? 95? XP. please, not Vista.... Mac OS-7.6? 9.1? OSX 10.1/2/3/4/5? TWM? Gnome? KDE? Any of them could be implemented if people actually wanted them enough to pay for the work.
Most of your mentioned GUIs have commonalities that makes it possible for programmers to create the "standard business" GUIs and for users to actually use them. See some older discussions in this list for some problem areas Squeak's GUI has.
Andreas
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Andreas Wacknitz -
Bill Schwab -
tim Rowledge