a new user from etoys

Andreas Raab andreas.raab at gmx.de
Fri Feb 7 00:05:10 UTC 2003


> At 5:19 PM +0300 2/5/03, Lex Spoon wrote:
> >I showed a thirteen-year-old how to do drive-a-car, and one 
> >of the first things I showed them (after THE first thing of
> >drawing a picture :)) was how to bring up a halo and do things
> >with it.  Well, for the first time in my small experience, they
> >actually got it about the halos
> 
> Younger kids -- hundreds of them -- have never had any problems with 
> the handles (both in US and Japan), so I wonder if the problems 
> you've seen had to do with older kids who have used other UIs ....

Well, first of all, a single person is not a statistically valid sample. So
it's entirely unclear if that was the rule or the exception for kids that
age/background/exposure and I wouldn't start wondering about "why they have
difficulties" before we know at least a little more.

> >Other things of note:
> >
> >	1. A menu popped up and wouldn't go away.  I also see 
> > this over and over again with the college students who use
> > Squeak at GT.

There are two cases where I know about this problem one of which happens
only under error conditions (and I presume this wasn't the problem here). So
the only case in which I know that a "menu pops up and won't go away" is
when you get a halo on the menu when it pops up (try on the world menu).
Note that this your only way to get any of the "reflective tools" (property
sheet, viewer, inspector etc) for a menu that does not have a "stay up"
element (and therefore I consider it kind of a feature). Note that the menu
will stay up after the halo "goes away" from it but it will go away if you
grab the menu (not by the halo of course ;-) move it a little and then click
outside. Again, try the world menu. If you know of any other condition in
which this happens it would be worthwhile to mention it.

> >	5. It is unclear how to minimize a viewer flap.  It 
> >didn't come across to this person as a flap.  Perhaps its
> >related to the fact that the flap icon is tiny.  Maybe the
> >first four viewer faps created in a project should have HUGE
> >flap tabs, and the tabs should only shrink when you
> >create more of them?
> 
> I think this is good.

I doubt it. My impression is that there is simply nothing that "looked like
a button" and just making that "picture" larger is (I think) unlikely to
help. I'd much rather give "you can click here" feedback when you mouse over
the tab and/or allow using the "O" button of the viewer in a flap to close
that flap (after all it says "remove this viewer from the screen" and to me,
closing the flap seems like a much more reasonable thing to do than deleting
the flap).

Cheers,
  - Andreas



More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list