[ENH] BrowserWithDragAndDrop (> Take a look! <)

JArchibald at aol.com JArchibald at aol.com
Fri May 5 08:51:16 UTC 2000


=> 5/4/00 10:14:20 PM, sr at evolgo.de =>
<< here is version 0.6 of the standard browser with drag&drop functionality. 
>>

Stephan,

This is really nice. Though I haven't been following closely the emerging 
discussions on drag and drop facilities within Squeak (I have paid more 
attention to the interest (or sanity, by detractors) of drag and drop within 
MVC), I had fairly clear idea of what I thought drag and drop should be 
capable of from prior experience of mine trying to define drag and drop 
within OS/2 and long usage in Team/V within Visual Smalltalk Enterprise. I 
had a lot of fun trying different possibilities within a Squeak.2052 image.

A few observations:

1.) The facility requires a Morphic project. That was not in the instructions 
(sorry, some of us retrogrades still work within MVC projects).

2.) The animation is delightful. It is particularly effective when the drag 
target is not legitimate, and the animation pleasantly 'sucks' the drag 
source back to its source pane (so much better than an error message). I also 
like the manner in which the animation 'follows' the target to the target 
pane. I thought it was much more evocative than having 'blinking' or some 
such in target pane.

3.) I was particularly impressed with the correct functioning of the drag & 
drop between Method Category Browsers under the same Class. I didn't push 
this too far, but what I did test did correctly work. 

4.) There seem to be method drag and drop cases between classes which would 
fail. I'm 
not sure what the rule is? The case which seems to fail is dragging #min: 
from class Magnitude to Date. Some other cases seemed to work.

5.) Certain methods from this ChangeSet have 'color' annotations (even when 
in MVC project). E.g., 
Browser>>changeCategoryForClass:srcSystemCategory:atListMorph:internal:copy: 
(and several others) but most do not. What is the history of these methods 
that they have such colorings, and other methods do not? (sorry if this is 
common knowledge for others, perhaps minimal familiarity on my part with 
tools available in Morphic inspires this question).

6.) Since you had nicely written your instructions within the preamble to the 
change set (it would be nice if more did so), at some point I tried to spawn 
a separate pane containing those instructions from a Simple Change Sorter. 
Alas, spawn does not work for preambles (MVC and Morphic). This is not your 
problem, just an observation on the behavior of ChangeSorters.

This is a really excellent implementation of drag and drop. I hope others 
'stop by' and take a look at what this achieves.

Cheers,
Jerry Archibald.
systemObjectivesIncorporated





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