On Wed, 13 Dec 2000 02:45:50 -0500 Doug Way <dway at riskmetrics.com> wrote:
>Stephane Ducasse wrote:
>> 
>> Still the look of Squeak sucks!!
>> Sorry to be provocative but I'm right.
>> The out of the box feeling is horrible.
>
>I've mostly gotten used to the look by now, but generally I agree with you.
>
>> May be one day we will have something decent. Who knows.
>> (I'm already hearing people saying "just do it this is open source")
>
>Probably the reason someone hasn't already "just done it" yet is that
>it's hard to get any sort of agreement on what would be the best
>improvements. (as you can see from the wide variety of responses on this thread)
[snip]
>I may try to put together a changeset with the above improvements, and
>see how things look.  I'm thinking of Morphic as the place to make these
>improvements rather than MVC, since it's the UI that's being worked on
>the most currently, and there was some talk of Morphic eventually being
>the startup project in Squeak.  Also, I tend to think that people more
>resistant to changing the look might be using MVC.  (plus, we already
>have SMA's "Blue Look" for MVC)

I think there are a few things worth considering:

- "The out of the box feeling is horrible" implies that there is only one box from which all users get their first impression. It seems quite reasonable to me that, if one is attempting to get others interested in Squeak, one might give them an image (or url pointing to same) tailored to best pique their interest. What will appeal to a potential user may depend heavily on things like age, primary language and ultimate goals (drawing pretty pictures vs. heavy crypto research, e.g.).
- While change sets are a useful vehicle for us (geeks) to pass snippets around, the average end-user will want something already set up in an appealing way. This means Morphic vs. MVC as the initial project, what preferences are set, the organization and content of projects in the image, the language used, etc.
- There is really little (other than proper reference to appropriate licenses) to prevent one from distributing modified images.
- An interesting experiment might be a site that would host various tailored images with, e.g., one for French-speaking school children and another for German-speaking computer science majors. Which of these images (if any) were actually successful in getting and keeping the attention of their target audience might, where similar, suggest useful improvements to the base image and, where very different, might argue for the maintenance of these specialized versions.

Cheers,
Bob