I don't think Stephane means to use native widgets. He just advocates the
inclusion *in the standard release* of some other looks. As a 'blue look'
user for over half a year now, I agree. Note that this does not mean that I
want the 'multi-colored, default look' gone; ideally I would like a fresh
image to pop-up a dialog letting me choose some look, and indicating me that
I can laterchange this in the settings (or just pop open the settings).

The reason is very simple: almost all the people that I just pointed to
Squeak (without giving them a demo) backed away because of the user
interface ! When I do a demo (so they see the full potential) or give them
the blue look, they tend to be more 'playful' and explore the environment.

So, again, I advocate 1) to include some other look(s) in the base image
everybody can download and 2) some mechanism to easily switch beween looks
and 3) a pop-up box on the first run to choose the look.



> Stephane Ducasse <ducasse at iam.unibe.ch> wrote:
>> ...But I'm really wondering why the blue look or some other nice
>> enhancements that  already improve the basic look in MVC are not
>> included in the release.
>> 
>> All the people to which I show squeak over the two last year told me the
>> same.
>> Open Squeak alone is depressing because the look is ugly.
> 
> That is my experience too.
> 
> However, when I tried to identify exactly what the problem was, I decided that
> "native widgets" like Asim suggested were not the answer. I don't want Squeak
> to look like Windows, or KDE, or Swing or whatever. VisualWorks does the
> native 
> widget emulation thing well, and still does not look all that good. I want
> Squeak to 
> look better than any of these.
> 
> Take a look at Henrik Gedenryd's preliminary anti-aliased font support for
> Squeak:
> http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/1231
> This is an example of a relatively minor (compared to native widgets)
> enhancement
> that improves the look of Squeak way beyond any other "IDE" I've seen.
> Hopefully, now
> that FreeType2 is officially released, this work can be finished and
> incorporated into
> the default image.
> 
> Other than fonts, I think much of the new user GUI shock could be fixed with
> some 
> preference adjustments in the default image.
> 
> 
> Ted Wright    mailto:wright at en.com
> 

--
Roel Wuyts                    Programming Technology Lab
rwuyts at vub.ac.be              Vrije Universiteit Brussel
http://prog.vub.ac.be/~rwuyts
Webmaster of European Smalltalk User Group: www.esug.org