On Friday, May 23, 2003, at 04:26 AM, Alan Grimes wrote:

> The generated code should add to the new class all code necessary to
> communicate with the embedded morph and instead of having to hunt down
> the methods for handling events, there should be an option to check off
> the events you want to handle and the method-stubs should be added to
> the appropriate classes automaticly. ;)
>
>
Alan, I'll dig around...I did something like this a year or two back but 
got sidetracked! I was having problems saving and loading morphs as .morph 
files and so I decided to make it 'programmatic' so i could build a 
structure and then have some Smalltalk popup in a StringHolder for cut and 
paste.

I agree though about GUI construction. It is very 'creative' with Morphic,
  a plus and a minus point. After using UIPainter in VisualWorks you 
realise how easy it can be to get a GUI running. There have been some 
credible efforts with Squeak and GUI building but somehow they all seem to 
not quite work. I think a major step forward be when MCP is 'completed'. 
Diego Gomez has produced a wicked little collection of packages that make 
things look 'more modern'.

My approach was to embed morphs freely using the halos and then I wrote 
some code, just in a workspace I think it was, which then traversed the 
submorph tree and for each submorph it spewed Smalltalk code for 
recreating the basic shape with respect to geometry and appearance. That's 
'all' I needed and all i coded for. I intended to use it on my Splahword 
game to convert the little man from a .morph file into a bit of code. 
Makes shipping things easier!

If you want to ask me questions any time about Morphic off-list I'm 
listening. I am currently trying to package the game using SAR file as it 
contains lots of WAV files and things. When it's ready I'd be more than 
happy to publish it to the list for review! I recently ran it on a 3.5-4 
beta VM Mac OS X, it it an old 3.1 image but it loaded and ran with no 
problems at all. Java is not that cool!

Sean.