Killer Application (was: Squeak Foundation)

Ricardo Bánffy rbanffy at utopia.com.br
Sun Jun 9 23:24:58 UTC 2002


Gary Fisher wrote:

>Not to, er, beat a dead horse <g> but Squeak windows act *EXACTLY* like
>native (Squeak) windows -- if I do something in Squeak on my Windows machine
>I can know in advance how it will look on your Mac or the next guy's Linux
>box or someone else's browser plugin.  
>
This is _generaly_  a good idea, but it may intimidate non-Squeak users 
(or less computer-savvy people). I know how to sit down in front of 
almost any window manager/GUI combination and get roductive in a short 
time, because I have been exposed to Windows, Mac and a bunch of other 
window managers and GUIs in the Unix world. This is not the same with my 
wife. She learned how to use Windows 9x and doesn't like the Macintosh I 
set up for her use at home (which has a far better screen, keyboard and 
mouse than her notebook). Maybe she doesn't like the way buttons are 
arranged, the way windows resize, the screen font... I can't point 
what's wrong, but fact is, she doesn't feel "at home" with MacOS and 
certainly wouldn't feel at home with any Unix window manager or under 
Squeak.

>That's the idea, IMHO; why should we
>expect Squeak to "respect" each OS' way of doing things rather than
>expecting the OS to respect the programmer's careful development work?
>  
>
We should not promote user or programmer segregation. But we could clone 
or ispire ourselves upon the pluggable look and feel engine in the Swing 
stuff have. This is a valuable asset as it allows users to retain THEIR 
environment. It makes no sense to pull up a simple yes-no dialog with a 
completely alien interface just to have a simple question answered.

Windows or MacOS or the various GUI toolkits we have today are not the 
programs that do janitorial work for the computer. We should not confuse 
the GUI with the OS (the computer janitor), but we can correlate, to a 
high degree in at least 99% of the desktop computer market, the GUI 
toolkit with the OS. Windows users expect their programs to share 
behaviour and when we show them something different, they tend to reject it.

It may not be the best that could happen (in fact, it is not), but it 
seems to be the way it is.

As for the not happy-happy post, thank you. Change is neccessary for growth.




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