Pretty cool.  It's very slow on my machine though (viewing my morph),
and it's a pretty fast one (700Mhz Athlon with Matrox Millenium G200
card).  However, the morph I made, which is essentially a giant table
made of rows made of cells, is suspiciously slow on its own.

I just did my first profile; nothing glaring came out.  Given my
complete ignorance of Morphic performance issues, I may have done some
very unfortunate things.

On the StoryBookMorph itself, some initial reactions (aside from Cool!).
* There's a little square on the bottom giving magnification and
position (?).  One can pull little images of the bigger window out of
this.  I kept wanting to do things, like click there to reposition the
larger window.  It didn't have any effect.
* left/right panning in the blue area worked, but moving up and down
didn't seem to have any effect (it did with the keys).
* I was able to remap the keys and get them to work for pan/zoom.
* The zoom seemed to require intermittent taps on the blue area with
the mouse to keep working.
* The zoom also stopped at places where I wanted to drive it further
(e.g., no smaller than occupying the whole screen).
* I really wanted the whole thing to be larger, but dragging resize on
the outer book morph doesn't do anything.  I finally selected the page
morph and managed to resize that, with the book following suit.
* The metaphors and modes of interaction seemed mixed, e.g., keys vs
mouse pointer.  Manipulation of visible controls (the cross hairs in
the blue box or the sliders underneath) vs. non visible (keys to zoom,
or clicking up halos on just the right submorph to achieve other
effects).
* Any reason to start the green story board so small in relation to
the window holding it?
* I wanted to be able to type in, e.g., the magnification factor (by
clicking on the number giving it and typing in a new value).
* Another metaphor I've been playing with is one where the mouse is
the camera.  So if I move it off center to the right the image scrolls
left under me.  I'd never need to leave the thing I'm interested in to
move around over it.  As far as I can tell, StoryBookMorph doesn't
operate this way.

Soapbox: Some of these issues are more general.  Smalltalk, and squeak
particularly, seems prone to hidden interfaces: you have to click, or
shift click ... to bring something up to do an operation.  If you
don't know the secret handshake, you're out of luck.  It's like some
of those computer adventure games where you spend all your time
clicking things randomly to see if anything will happen.  I know it's
hard, but it's better to have more obvious clues about how to do things.

On Fri, Jun 29, 2001 at 08:59:42AM -0400, Bob Arning wrote:
> Ross,
> 
> One thing you could play with is the StoryboardBookMorph from the new morph/books menu. This is an experiment that has some rough edges, but it might give you some ideas.
> 
> - Get a StoryboardBookMorph from the menu
> - Drop one or more morphs (really big ones are fine) into the pale green playfield inside the book.
> - Drag the mouse laterally in the pale blue area to pan the image. Use the cursor keys (set up for a Mac at the moment, but reprogrammable from the red halo menu on the pale blue area) to zoom and tilt. The mouse must be in the blue area for the keys to work.
> 
> Cheers,
> Bob
> 
> On Fri, 29 Jun 2001 01:47:02 -0700 Ross Boylan <RossBoylan at stanfordalumni.org> wrote:
> >Background: I'm working on a priorities planning tool.  (Even though it 
> >probably shouldn't be a priority for  me!)  One of the things I'm doing is 
> >classifying tasks in various ways, such as the part of my life they deal 
> >with and the kind of interaction they involve (e.g., people or 
> >machines).  Each of these sets of spheres is (conceptually) a hierarchical 
> >tree, with more detailed divisions as you go down.  But the trees get kind 
> >of large.
>