Maui utility (was: MVC vs. Morphic)

Chris Muller afunkyobject at yahoo.com
Fri Sep 3 04:15:40 UTC 2004


I have been exploring Morphic trying to create a user-interface utility that is
not windowy.  It presents rectangles on the screen that each represent a single
domain object to which you can drag messages of its class right out of the
system browsers and drop them on the rectangle.  You can then click on the
message to run the method.  For binary and keyword messages, a little
black-hole is present where you drop other morphs as parameters (the object
they represent ends up being the parameter, not the Morph itself).

I'm calling it "Maui" and I can hardly wait to finish and share it.

Learning and working with Morphic, for me, has been "hard fun" (to steal from
one of Alans videos).  But I'm glad, frankly, that Morphic is not conventional.
 I think its exceptional, and its basic-building-blocks approach has been much
less constraining than what I remember from Motif.  Morphic has made it
reasonably possible to implement ideas I only imagined with my eyes closed,
unconstrained by the bounds and parameters of a consistent, window-based UI
framework.

Until something better lets me do that, here's to Morphic!

 - Chris



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