Preliminary release of Squeak3.0 available for test

Doug Way dway at riskmetrics.com
Mon Feb 5 20:23:15 UTC 2001


Here are my general comments on the 3.0 image, including some bug (and style problem) reports:

- I noticed there was no option to open an MVC project from the World/open menu.  I guess this is okay, since people looking for MVC will most likely not be beginners, and will probably be able to figure out how to open an MVC project via a DoIt.  (I'm guessing removing it from the menu must be a step toward moving MVC into a separate package.)

- I like the rounded corners in principle, but the rounded corners on the windows don't look as nice as they could, IMHO, the way the corners are only 1 pixel thick but the rest of the borders are 2 pixels thick.  The rounded-corner menus don't have this problem... perhaps the rounded corners in the windows could be cleaned up to look like the ones in the menus.  (I remember they used to awhile back.)

- The X's and O's in the old window titlebars (Welcome, Play With Me's...) look sort of ugly because they're too low by one pixel.  New windows don't have this problem (including the Nebraska Tips window).  Probably something got lost in the MVC->Morphic translation of these windows.

- The image starts up in 16-bit color instead of 8-bit color, but after playing around with this, I think this is a good thing.  Most people have 16/32-bit color capable machines these days, and things will look nicer in Squeak by default.  For the smaller number of people with 8-bit color on their OS, things still seem to work fine, with the very minor downside that Squeak won't know to do halftoning.

- Playing with 3.0 on my Mac yesterday, I could have sworn there was a problem with dragging windows out of the Tools flap, in which the windows had messed up borders (3 pixels thick on the left, and the Package Browser had corners in the wrong places)... but things seem fine on my Windows machine at work.  Oh wait, now on this Windows machine, the Package Browser is messed up when opened from the open.../package browser... menu, but not the flap.  Weird.

- The Swiki link in the Getting Started window points to the old 2.4 SqueakDoc page.  The link text looks correct, but it still links to the wrong page.  (Also, make sure a ReadMe.txt file is included with the 3.0 distribution if the link for it is going to be in the window.)

- The Menu flap opens on mouse-over, not mouse-click.  This is inconsistent with the other flaps, and it seems like it's too easy to accidentally invoke it.  (Especially given that the menu flap is of borderline usefulness, IMHO...)


- Doug Way
  dway at riskmetrics.com





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