Hi all,

I spent yesterday evening demo'ing Squeak to a fellow who works with  
EdUbuntu and OLPC since he wanted to write his educational software  
in Squeak to save space on the laptop. His kids were there and really  
got into it after some of the capabilities were made more obvious.

I got some great feedback, and it's always cool for me to show off  
Squeak games (the RTS that Eddie Cottongim made years ago is perhaps  
the best of the non-EToys style) and coding to kids, since I don't  
regularly work with them and most developers are such sticks-in-the- 
mud about the weird UI.

Anyway, it occurred to me that just a little bit of effort in the UI  
design department would quickly improve Squeak's draw. Since I know  
the SqueakMap package loader and it's Squeak's gateway to the  
community for newbies as they start up Squeak (or should be), I  
started there.

I've added some buttons to a toolbar at the top and stole  
MessageNames' search bar to be more clear about the UI.

Current Screenshot (doesn't reflect help-balloon cleanups):
http://briantrice.com/Images/Squeak/SMLoader1.jpeg
With a filter on:
http://briantrice.com/Images/Squeak/SMLoader1Filtered.jpeg

These are only incremental changes, since I don't want to take on a  
huge-scope project, and don't own this and other packages, so a huge  
fork would be politically difficult. The best application code I  
found for Morphic UI was actually the IRC client, although it is a  
bit spec-heavy.

What do people think of this idea? Particularly the package owners,  
like Göran, but also whoever is "in charge" of the overall UI face of  
Squeak (that is, whoever would complain loudest if I wanted to  
totally re-arrange the world menus).

Also, which projects make this kind of effort obsolete or easier? I  
know about and like the Services/Commands framework and UI, and  
Tweak's menubar system, but don't know what they seek to replace.  
What I don't know is whether there is a simple menu-bar or other such  
system for easily setting up some shared-styled UI features that get  
the salient features right in front of the user instead of burying  
them in context menus.

Okay, I'll stop here for now. Feedback welcome!

--
-Brian
http://briantrice.com

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