>From: Benoit St-Jean <bstjean at yahoo.com>
>Reply-To: The general-purpose Squeak developers 
>list<squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
>To: The general-purpose Squeak developers 
>list<squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
>Subject: Re: Serious Squeak (other "survey")
>Date: Sat, 14 Oct 2006 11:18:32 -0700 (PDT)
>
>Personally, I do the same things in Dolphin Pro that I
>do in Squeak.  It's just a bit more pleasant in
>Dolphin since my "experiments" have a "more
>professionnal" look than they have in Morphic.
>

But does it have to be this way?  Is there some fundamental problem with 
Morphic that makes it look the way it does?  I was under the impression that 
the reason squeak went with Morphic was because it was a more advanced 
concept.  Is this incorrect?

>VisualWorks suffered from the same problem for
>years...  All our clients had issues with the look and
>feel of our product (it was on 2.5).  They were
>totally pleased with the functionnalities and how easy
>we could deliver them modifications and new
>functionalities but the GUI really bogged them.  It
>had that "not really a real Windows UI" kinda
>perception that made them even consider other "nicer"
>products that didn't even have a tenth of the
>functionnalities we had.
>
>But for most people (in the commercial world), the UI
>is the first impression they have of your product and
>when it looks like Morphic (i.e. really far from a
>Windows XP look and feel), they don't even go further
>and see what's "under the hood" only because "it looks
>crappy" to them...
>

And this is a valid way for them to think.  Software needs to move forward, 
not backward.  If a package doesn't have a pretty bow, then for most people 
it doesn't matter *what* is inside, because they aren't going to bother to 
look.  Who would hire some guy with a terrible hair cut, dirty cloths and 
smells terrible as their CEO (the companies most visable person)?  No one.  
And the software they use is also a reflection of them in a similar way.

Having said all that, I am personally not overly concerned about the look of 
Morphic because seaside makes the best looking pages I have seen.  And I 
think the "fat client" days are on their way out.  It's just too painful to 
fight with client setup issues.  If your competitor can sell the same 
application as you, with the same functionality, but it's web based then you 
are going to lose.  While you are trying to get a new client build to deal 
with the latest Windows XP patch, they will be adding new features.