Hi Scott,
I'm not sure if this is appropriate for the mailing list, but it can't 
hurt.

On Wednesday, April 17, 2002, at 10:00 PM, Dan Ingalls wrote:

> Folks -
>
> Scott Wallace and I have just made a pact to finish up the 3.2 release 
> in the next week or so.  It's mostly straightforward, but we wanted to 
> check with everyone about three things:
>
> 1.  Scott will be making an initial setting for all the preferences.  
> If you have a strong feeling about these or know of any problems with 
> preferences, etc., please let him know ASAP.

I apologize for not bringing this up sooner, but I would *very* much 
prefer having the Optional Buttons preference turned on for the release 
image. This feature is nice and stable now, and it gives new users and 
programmers a convenient visual cue for the good tools that are 
available for exploring the code and developing some understanding. 
Similarly, the file lists become that much easier to handle.

I run the #Squeak channel on OpenProjects IRC network, and a lot of my 
time is spent helping both new and old programmers (including quite a 
few students from a certain Squeak-using university which shall not be 
named) to understand just how good a set of tools they have for 
exploring. Very often they have a rather shallow understanding of most 
of the systems in Squeak until they discover merely that these tools are 
even available, and the Preferences panes are often a bit daunting for 
them to navigate (often they don't know what most things mean). Of 
course the experts know what suits them best and often turn this off. 
But for the (perhaps) thousands of users who download Squeak to see what 
this Smalltalk stuff is all about, it's asking a bit much to put a tool 
in a shifted menu that is relevant only on a text selection!

I hope I've made a sufficient case here, because 3.2 will obviously be 
the official release for some time. You'd be really surprised at how 
many people enter the channel claiming a year of fiddling with Squeak, 
very impressed, but feeling relatively powerless, until things like this 
are revealed to them. Enlightenment truly does ensue. :) Seriously, I 
took it for granted that people with experience not only "knew" of 
protocol and hierarchy browsers and such, but were using them; then I 
discovered over time that each of them was running into many 
difficulties because of this kind of blind spot. I've even seen people's 
complaints over the nearly total lack of online documentation become 
much more calm when they realize how they can learn about the code.

Thanks,
~
Brian T. Rice