Henrik Gedenryd wrote:
> 
> Doug Way wrote:
> 
> > The
> > alpha blending is cool, but should probably be a preference.
> 
> I thought about this a while ago, and I realized that to get a new look
> accepted into the image, we would need a whole bunch of preferences. This is
> because Squeak may run on an incredible variety of hardware, with varying
> performance.
>
> We'd therefore need switches to let you adapt the UI fanciness to the level
> of your hardware, much like many games allow you to change graphics
> parameters so that the game runs well on your machine. Thus the prefs should
> show what things are resource-hungry (alpha and shadows come to mind).

Yes, we would need a few new preferences, but I'm not sure we'd need a whole bunch.  A lot of the important preferences are already there, such as window color (the "appearance"/"window colors" menu), fastDragWindow, rounded corners, the various scrollbar preferences, etc.

We would want prefs for the resource-hungry items such as alpha and shadows, hopefully not too many beyond that.  Maybe a pref related to titlebar color.  (I think we probably wouldn't want to bother with prefs for things like whether the titlebar text should be centered or left-aligned, or for different styles of titlebar buttons.  Although I suppose those could be added later.)

(Actually, the current Window Colors dialog could probably be beefed up to handle a few more possibilities.  One obvious missing feature is the ability to pick a non-white color to apply to all window types.)

> From this, I thought it would be a short distance to merging your stuff and
> mine together, simply making the differences a matter of preference,
> literally. (Different colors for different window types? etc.) In this way
> everyone would have the best of both worlds etc.

Yes.  It ought to be possible for someone to get something very much like the Blue Look just by setting his/her window color to white and maybe setting a preference or two.

> Btw, the NewLookSampleProject on BSS doesn't seem to load correctly (into
> 3.1 at least).

Yeah, perhaps a project wasn't necessarily the best way to handle that... the project was created sometime during 2.9alpha and is now very out of date.  Maybe just a .gif file showing the relevant UI elements would be good for reference.  (It'd show some windows, some with buttons, and menus.)

> So this is what I had in mind though I haven't gotten around to it.
> 
> Then there's a second big problem that needs to be addressed. The
> SystemWindow code is a big sorry mess. As it is, the same coordinates for
> widget locations occur two or three times, for example. Also, at one time my
> code seemed to break with every third update change set or so, it was like
> SystemWindow was Grand Central Station. This was when I got fed up with
> keeping my look working.
> 
> I think that the title bar should be made into a submorph and all related
> code moved there. This should solve many problems, if not all. I don't know
> what this would mean for MVC compatibility, however.

Actually, I think Jesse Welton submitted a changeset awhile ago which cleaned up a few things, including making the titlebar a submorph, which is now in 3.1alpha.  (Although I guess all the code is still in SystemWindow.)

> > On the other hand, I'm trying to make my changeset look good with the
> > multi-colored windows of Squeak, which I think is probably a necessary
> > requirement for getting it accepted by SqC & the community.
> 
> I am curious: How many of you out there prefer multicolored windows
> (backgrounds, not title bars)? If so, what is it that you like? Or is this
> just a legacy thing that has just been hanging on and you aren't really
> bothered enough to care about it? Perhaps this has been on the table before.

I'm mostly neutral on this, for what it's worth.  Actually, I slightly prefer the colored windows, as long as they're the subtler pastel colors... I think it is possible to make them look fairly slick.  We should probably just support both multicolored and uniformly colored windows, and maybe leave it up to SqC to decide which should be the default.

> Doug, you can mail me off list if you think this is the time to do it, so we
> can set up the work agenda.

I think now may be a good time, since I think we're still in the middle of the 3.1alpha cycle.  Someone from SqC let us know if this is a bad time for some reason (e.g. if 3.1 is on the verge of being released.)  I'll email you off-list shortly.

- Doug Way
  dway at riskmetrics.com