A stupid newbie question

G.J.Tielemans at dinkel.utwente.nl G.J.Tielemans at dinkel.utwente.nl
Tue Oct 9 07:54:13 UTC 2001


Yes, one of the old metaphors was the multidocument interface (MDI 1986?)
Your screen surrounded by a windowborder was a kind of canvas where you
could place objects.
If one of the documents had the focus-of-control, then you could look in the
menubar and it's pulldown-menus what was possible with that object.
Originally (look in the original specs of OS/2 and Windows?) these menus had
a logical order: the first menu was for manipulating a complete file form/to
the canvas. The second menu-option was for manipulating (parts) of an object
on the canvas that had the focus-of-control(=hit by the mouse). The third
menu was for the differnet views on the object:draft, outline, etc.. 

For example: the possible manipulations on parts of a graphic-object (with
focus) on the canvas are listed in the second menu of the bar, the
edit-menu. 

After that the programs became more and more complex and drifted away from
the original MDI. In this way Squeak looks nowadays like a Rococco MDI with
lots of ornaments.. but it did loose (never had?) the menu-bar from that
concept:

How deep is this old MDI-knowledge already burned in your memory-traces? To
give you an example: are you using Word? Does it bother you that you always
have trouble to find the header & footer menu-item? 
Not your fault: it is not in the second-menu where you (already
unconscious?) look for tools to manipulate parts of an object
(object=document, part =bottompart). Instead of that it is in the view menu,
not the place where you expect manipulation-options: you do not want to view
the footer, but handle it...

Squeak is in the strong-object-tradition of Smalltalk. Everything is an
object. Kick the object with your yellow shoe and it tells you what you can
do with it. Kick it with your other (red) feet and it tells you what else
you can do. Kick it with --- censored ---

For normal users it is weird to push on something they do not see (the
canvas).
(By coincendence I did create in the Rolodex-tutorial the search-button as
part of the page of the book: pushing on every spot of the page - with
exception of the book menubar - had the same result as pushing the button, I
was wondering if...)

As a concession to these people you can pin the Worldmenu on the canvas, so
they have someting visible to kick at. 
The same user-friendly-movement you can see in the Morph world: first we
hide all the options and then - one after the other - they come back as
visible objects on the canvas... then they are grouped in flaps - O NO, you
will say, flaps are NOT camouflaged menubars, and if someone tries to
reintroduce menubars he got.. reactions.



-----Original Message-----
From: John Hinsley [mailto:jhinsley at telinco.co.uk]
Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2001 1:55 AM
To: squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org
Subject: Re: A stupid newbie question


Stephen Pair wrote:
> 
> > as I see it, we
> > either give in to old and pretty dreadful metaphors, or we
> > try and do something better.
> 
> Looks like we have two metaphors to compare:
> 
> A) Double click and icon and squeak runs
> B) Drag one icon on top of another and run Squeak
> 
> Seems to me like B is the more dreadful metaphor.  All this argument
> ever amounts to is that for most of us, the effort required to get a
> double clickable Squeak image (where the image and VM are bundled
> together) or to create an install application for all platforms is just
> not worth it.  A lot of people seem to want it bad enough to complain
> about it, but not so many (none) seem to want it bad enough to actually
> code it.
> 

Well, maybe, but these are *not* the metaphors I had in mind! (Actually,
in Windows and in Kde, I click (double in the first, single in the
latter) on a mouse icon to start Squeak). I was thinking more of the
tired old metaphors elsewhere in Windows (Gary having made a point about
HCI and familiarity) but Alan puts this better, so I'll shut up!

Cheers

John


-- 
If you don't care about your data, like file systems which automagically
destroy themselves and have money to burn on 3rd party tools to keep
your
system staggering on, Microsoft (tm) have the Operating System for you.





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