On Sunday 09 June 2002 12:28 am, Niko Schwarz wrote:

> if i imagine shipping something with squeak, then soon the user
> will find out that theres more in the image than just my app. he
> might find an irc client, lots of ways to debug my code and change
> it, but to be honest i dont want that.

One of the goals of the Modules work is to make it easy to ship apps 
with just the pieces you really need.

> how do you explain to a client that you didnt ship what he bought,
> but instead a huge scary bunch of things, and the worst: something
> that looks so fragible at first glance.

Don't ship all the scary things.

However, many apps could be described the same way. Microsoft Office 
comes to mind: Word, for instance, ships with much more functionality 
than most of its users need. Recently MS has figured out that people 
will be happier if the parts they don't use are hidden from them but 
still accessible.

> and it _is_ fragible: when the user does something wrong, he might
> drag my app into the trash bin 

You're confusing Squeak with the Mac. On Squeak, only Morphs can be 
dragged into the trash bin. Unless your app is a single custom-built 
Morph.

> and then you can imagine him whining
> and asking with reason: "why do i ship my app with a
> self-destruction button?".

Squeak has several Preferences that limit the options presented to a 
user. You can easily limit what a user can do.

> a solution could be to ship as etoy, and
> i think this is a reasonable effort. is it true that once i shift
> my image into etoy mode, theres no way back? that would be exactly
> what i want.

Look at SqueakNews to see an example of a solidly constructed app that 
doesn't allow any access into the underlying operating system: menus 
are customized, the global exception handler is replaced, and there 
is a customized app startup that is very hard to avoid.

-- 
Ned Konz
http://bike-nomad.com
GPG key ID: BEEA7EFE