I don't intend to be rude to you, so please don't take any of this
personally; unless you are of the people that implemented any of the
'popular' commercial UIs, in which case - "Thhhhhhhpurb" (attempted
web-rasberry)

> Why bother creating yet another look and feel when we all use and are 
> experienced with what comes with our native operating systems?
Maybe because all of them are absolute junk. Windows is apalling, Mac is
cretinous, Gnome &  KDE make windows almost look good, Acorn is
ridiculous. I just about tolerate Acorn because I'm so used (innured?)
to it, but really guys, they're all just pathetic.

> 1) Allow the use of native windows and widgets through an interface 
> that means you can write code that will work across most of the 
> deployed platforms with the look and feel of those platforms.
This is just about doable. Portability in this is really difficult; I
worked on a big project attacking it at ParcPlace. It shewed promise,
but involved major work in FFI, callbacks, fixing bugs in the native
widgets themselves. A mojor pain. During the work, we noticed that
hardly any major applications actually used the native widgets anyway.
M$ were particularly prone to this.
There was a pretty damn good paper on this in the OOPSLA 95(?)
proceedings.
> 
> 
> 2) Develop a completely new and different user interface/experience 
> that will be wicked and weird and beautiful and, generally, make 
> people's jaws drop.
I think that's what many of us are working on. 
> 
> 
> Perhaps both could be done, but it seems to me to be a waste of time 
> to write code to make Squeak look like another operating system.
Web browsing presents a quite different UI to most OSs, and offers at
least a chance that we can force open the door to something better. One
of the things I particularly dislike about all the .NET BS is the
transparent attempt by M$ to make the web look like windows. Yuck.


-- 
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Strange OpCodes: DTF: Dump Tape to Floor