Yep!

Cheers,

Alan

------

At 4:07 AM -0800 2/28/00, Jay Carlson wrote:
>I think all this talk about Visual Basic stirs up unnecessary loathing.
>Lemme summarize and rephrase some of the messages I've made it through:
>
>It Would Be Nice If Squeak had the same level of UI construction,
>extensibility, and friendliness to users at different sophistication levels,
>as HyperCard.
>
>HyperCard has a collection of different control types, roughly mapped to
>what's in the Mac toolbox.  You can build a UI that (more or less) looks
>like what users normally see on some platform.  Just drag the components off
>the palette.
>
>HyperCard explictly has multiple access levels.  At the browsing level, I
>can just interact with an app without worrying about messing it up.  At the
>scripting level, I can write code associated with everything I see.  In
>between, there are some construction activities that don't require me to
>know as much about the internals of the system.  (I think that any Squeak
>level system would have at least one level beyond what HC regards as
>"scripting"; there's more detail available in Squeak than in HC.)
>
>HyperCard has Undo.  That's important.  No, you can't reverse arbitrary
>computations, but when you do something disasterous in Morphic it's often
>not clear what to do to get back.  For example, I keep moving subpanes out
>of their containers, and they never seem to want to fit back properly.
>
>My favorite is when you select the wrong level of morph to manipulate---like
>the text, rather than the scrolling view that surrounds it.  The first time
>I did this, I said "wow! look at all the generality in the system!".  The
>second time, it made me wonder "is there some way of automatically locking
>substructure that an app isn't dealing with?".  The third time I just got
>annoyed.  I'm still trying to get my head around Paragraph, so these kinds
>of changes in Morphic are beyond me for the moment.
>
>I don't need to convince Squeak people that some aspects of a HyperCard-y
>model are the right thing.   From what I can tell, Squeak *is* moving in
>this general direction.  OK, maybe consensus on a requirements set could
>better congeal a roadmap on how to get there (and thus suck in more people
>to work on it, which would make me happier).  But construction is at the
>core of the dynabook; I know we'll be working on it, even if a
>deployable-app capability doesn't fall out as soon as everyone would like.
>
>Maybe that's a key difference between HC and VB.  Both make it easy to build
>UIs, but VB is concerned, above all else, with being able to deploy apps.
>
>Jay