[Newbies] Fill gradient on desktop / world

[Jerome Peace]

Hi Tim,

I am surprised you are having difficulties. I am not surprised squeak has focus bugs. I saw a lot of them back in the days of 3.x too. 

You had mentioned the world background so I deliberately tried the procedure I describe in a 4.2 image. 

Well there are lots of ways to do it. Lets have you try another one.

Bring up the halo for the world. Hold shift down and click on the change color button. (purple handle lower right.) You will get a Properties for ... (in this case pasteup morph) block with four color palettes on it.
The top two control the beginning and ending color of the gradient.

You can play with these but you may notice that the middle of the gradient stays gray in 4.3 . If that happens you can get back to just two colors by deselecting and reslecting the gradient fill box. You will then have the std two color top to bottom gradient and (hopefully) control over those two colors from the palettes in the property box. You can adjust the origin and direction with the buttons by the gradient color palette.

This color properties block is available for any of the morphs via their halo. It has been my experience that shift-clicking a handle is a hard thing to discover on ones own. Also all magic is simple once the trick in known.

I tested the technique in squeak4.3-11157 so if you have a different image YMMV. However this technique has worked on all images since at least 3.9.

Let me know how you make out. 

Probably irrelevant info: the vm is from a conlinux-nb distribution dated oct2010. I believe any valid current vm that runs squeak should give the correct results. 

Yours in curiosity and service, --Jerome Peace



--- On Mon, 4/18/11, Tim Johnson <tjohnson at iwu.edu> wrote:

> From: Tim Johnson <tjohnson at iwu.edu>
> Subject: Re: [Newbies] Fill gradient on desktop / world
> To: "A friendly place to get answers to even the most basic questions about Squeak." <beginners at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
> Date: Monday, April 18, 2011, 11:07 AM
> Hi Jerome,
> 
> On Apr 18, 2011, at 2:02 AM, Jerome Peace wrote:
> 
> > World menu>appearance  (click the stay up
> pin)
> 
> Ah, I had not done the stay up pin.
> 
> > then
> >> set desktop color (this puts up a pallette )
> > click the round dot on the left this is the stay up
> button 
> > when you click it an x will appear next to it.
> 
> Behavior in my 4.2 image is different.  The
> color-palettes stay open by default, the round dot is a
> "pick up" button and the 'x' is already there.
> 
> > next
> >> set gradient color (this puts up the second
> pallette underneath the first)
> > click the stay up dot.
> > 
> > Now you can play
> > 
> > Mouse down and drag the cursor around on the top box
> to set a solid color.
> > Then mouse down and drag the cursor around to vary the
> gradient color.
> > The order is important as the top box will undo the
> work of the bottom box.
> > 
> > When you are satisfied dismiss the boxes by clicking
> the x's
> 
> Unfortunately none of this works for me, in any of these
> 4.2 images.  This is true whether I am trying to change
> the World's desktop, or if I, say, drag out a Star morph and
> try to change its gradient.  It seems I may have gotten
> it to work one time (out of 60) on a Star morph -- having
> "gradient fill" with my selected colors -- but I have no
> idea why, may have imagined it, and the halcyon moment has
> gone.  
> 
> It seems that it may be a mouse focus-related issue, since
> the color palettes (a) are not attached to the hand when
> opening, but rather plop down wherever they see fit, and (b)
> follow the mouse with their little red circle, even when
> they shouldn't have focus (i.e. I haven't clicked in
> them).  This leads me to believe it could be a VM
> problem... I am using Mac VM 4.2.5b1.
> 
> Additionally, it seems that the behavior of the morph's
> "fill style" menu is somewhat broken.  It looks like it
> is supposed to change itself based on which fill style is
> chosen -- to give you options related to that specific fill
> style.  But when the morph's menu is pinned, the "fill
> style" menu seems locked on which ever one was selected when
> pinned.
> 
> Thanks,
> Tim
> 
> 
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