Hi!

Most arguments were already heard.  IMHO, Andrew's statements should
contain a few more "I think" or "IMHO" expressions.  That would keep them
valid without raising (this kind) of response :-)

It is my understanding, that the look and the first impression of a program
is everything.  If I evaluate software, I decide in the first 5 minutes,
whether I really want to spend more time on it or not.  There're enough
alternatives.  I love WinZip because of its colorful icons.  If an
application has a badly designed GUI and there's an alternative, I'll pick
that.  Colors are also important.  If the application's colors seem to
fight each other for the user's attention, it's too late.

When I browse the web for applications, I love to look at screen shots.
Otherwise, I'd rethink twice whether I want to download 15 MB of (in the
case of SQ2.4c still uncompressed!) of unknown code.

For Squeak, I'd recommend to prepare a short tour through the system,
similar to the Dolphin Smalltalk tour.  However, I'd suggest to slightly
adapt the default screen colors first.  Showing different kinds of browsers
in different colors is nice (especially with the morphic flaps enabled) but
_please_ use more eye-friendly color combinations.  (As an alternative, you
might want to use colors titlebars only.)

After I filed in the new title bar and Bert's 3D look, Morphic looked
somewhat professional for the first time.  Unfortunately, popup menus still
look the same.


Some topics for a tour: * The Welcome screen, mention the Readme will all
the things you can try out. * Show a screen where one of the graphic
effects is tried * Now the play-with-me 3 screen, but explain how to enter
and leave that project (BTW, why does the enter menu shows up on the left
button only - as the only menu in the whole system!?) * Now show the class
browser, here're the classes; explain that there're popup menus all over
the place * Message browser, if you're interested in senders and
implementors  * File browser, in case you want to load some code *
Debugger, because with working, there'll be errors * The inspector * the
selector finder * Change List, to explain projects * Morphic, a collection
of browsers in the Morphic look * SameGame, actually one of the most
important applications if you ask me * and last but not least Allice.


bye
--
Stefan Matthias Aust  //  Bevor wir fallen, fallen wir lieber auf.