On Tue, 1 Sep 1998, Stefan Matthias Aust wrote:

> >Has anyone tried creating Windows-look
> >widgets with Morphic?
> 
> First of all, emulating an existing GUI is a damn big challenge you
> cannot code in a weekend (unfortunately, I once tried ;-). There's
> always the problem that you get the look only 90% right and the last
> remaining 10% make the people notice that everything is only fake. 

Very true.  Even Visualworks, which has decent Windows emulation, is only
probably 98% of the way there.  On the VW 1.0/2.0 project I worked on, one
complaint was that the text cursor didn't blink, so we had an extra
process running in the image just to handle cursor blinking.

Keyboard accelerator emulation sounds like a real problem, as you say.
Sigh.  Maybe supporting native widgets directly would be less work after
all. :-)  But the fun thing about emulated widgets is that you still have
the freedom to customize the widgets any way you'd like, inspect them,
etc.  Also, I think a lot of missing widgets (sliders, spin buttons, etc.)
are the kinds of things that individual Squeakers could contribute if an
emulated widget set was most of the way there that people were actually
starting to use.

> I also looked at Morphic and found this much more difficult to use. 
> Morphic is very promising, but still very experimental. As it mixes up
> model, view and controller in just one class, it's difficult for me to
> tell what method is used (if it's used at all) for which task. It's
> lacking documentation! 

I haven't used MVC or Morphic much (mostly just the VW gui builder), but
the idea of having all three in one class appeals to me a bit more.  I
didn't mind the Model/View split in MVC, but the separate Controller class
always seemed like a somewhat unnecessary complication.  Anyway, I'm going
to try some of this stuff in Morphic.

- Doug Way
  dway at mat.net
  dway at transom.com
  http://www.transom.com