Hi, Doug,

Yes, the intent of the "Restore All System Defaults" button is 
exactly that -- to revert all preferences to their "standard initial 
state."

But what is that standard initial state?  It is whatever we come out 
of the box with in the real 3.0.  As we work toward agreeing on the 
"real 3.0" settings, we will be able to keep pace with the current 
theory of what those standard initial settings should be by hitting 
that Restore Defaults button.

The defaults you see in today's image are just a first cut at those 
settings; we are still in active debate about what those settings 
should be.

So what are people's opinions on whether #scrollBarsNarrow should be 
true or false?

   -- Scott

PS:  it would be a simple matter for someone to add two buttons to 
the new help pane of the Preferences panel that would let you save 
all your preference settings to a file, and restore such settings 
from such a file.  Simply writing the FlagDictionary to a 
ReferenceStream on a file would do the trick, for example.  Or one 
might want to get slightly more comprehensive and package up various 
other user-configuration choices into the file as well, such as font 
settings, default screen depth, author initials, default Author name, 
etc.

PPS:  It would also be easy enough to add controls to the Preferences 
Panel that started to support "Skins".  One skin might be "Classic 
Smalltalk-80" -- quite possibly the out-of-box experience of 3.0 in 
fact -- and another might reflect the style of use of have the 
optional panes turned on, "smart updating" in force, flaps showing, 
etc.


.At 1:26 PM -0500 2/6/01, Doug Way wrote:
>Dan Ingalls wrote:
>>
>>  3518prefs-sw -- Scott Wallace -- 6 February 2001
>>  Adds a ? category to the preferences panel, which has a type-in 
>>pane for searching, as well as a couple of control buttons.
>>  Cleans up initialization of preferences somewhat by consolidating 
>>the initializers into a single category.
>>  Consolidates all the accumulated automatically-generated 
>>preference initializer methods into a single big method, stripping 
>>out the dozens of former initializer methods."
>
>I noticed the "Restore All System Defaults" button in the ? category 
>in the preferences panel, which I assumed would restore the 
>preferences back to what they were in the original 3.0 image.  When 
>I tried it, though, some unexpected preferences were turned on, such 
>as scrollBarsNarrow.  The system default preferences should probably 
>be changed to match the ones in the original image.
>
>- Doug Way
>   dway at riskmetrics.com