Thinking about a better UI

Norton, Chris chrisn at Kronos.com
Fri Apr 16 16:09:07 UTC 1999


Hi Michael.

The fish-eye approach sounds like an interesting concept.  It might be cool
if "older" views/morphs could auto-shrink if you haven't visited them for a
long time.

However I don't believe the stack approach (for browsers) would always be
appropriate; especially if you like to use drag and drop.  In VSE, I
commonly move/drag or copy/drag methods from one class into another by using
two browsers.  If all of my browsers were in a stack, I wouldn't be able to
do this, nor would I be able to see two browsers at the same time (for
comparing two things, for example).

Thanks for your thoughts, though.  I think this area (the physical
management of our Squeak morphs & views) needs to be seriously considered
and revised in a future release.

---==> Chris

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Michael Rueger [SMTP:m.rueger at acm.org]
> Sent:	Friday, April 16, 1999 2:50 AM
> To:	squeak at cs.uiuc.edu
> Subject:	Re: Thinking about a better UI
> 
> 
> 
> "Norton, Chris" wrote:
> > 
> > Hear hear!  I constantly have multiple windows open (Squeak and other
> apps
> > too).
> 
> Way back in Magdeburg (before Squeak was ported ;-) ) we worked with
> fish eye techniques, applying them to window managers and sub panes as
> well.
> The original work was done in VW, but I know Andreas has implemented
> part of it in Squeak too.
> 
> One of the basic ideas was to allow for resizing of one or a set of
> several windows while auto magically shrinking the others.
> The same technique would apply for the sub panes, e.g. enlarging the
> code view, while shrinking the class list.
> 
> > In fact, when I program my Smalltalk in VSE I often have 12 or more
> windows
> > open, including several browsers, my sample application(s),
> inspector(s),
> The set of windows mentioned above e.g. supported window stacks, that is
> a set of similar windows (like browsers) are stacked on top of each
> other with a slight offset, so each one was reachable at any given time.
> In terms of the zoom window manager, however, this stack was treated as
> one unit, that is resized (not moved, but that would come as a
> straightforward extension I believe).
> 
> Michael
> 
> 
> +------------------------------------------------------------+
> | Michael Rueger    m.rueger at acm.org      ++1 (310) 937 7196 |
> +------------------------------------------------------------+





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