On 8/11/07, Bill Schwab <BSchwab at anest.ufl.edu> wrote:
>
> >From a developer's perspective, it is a tough transition.  I can work in
> Squeak, but it is a bitter pill compared to Dolphin.  From an end-user's
> perspective, I fear that Squeak out of the box would cause mutiny.  As I
> have always said, the GUI feel the problem.  I deal with busy users in
> sometimes dire circumstances.  They cannot be expected to remember
> whether they have previously opened a dialog (modality can be a good
> thing).  I think I would be able to design and build around some of the
> limitations.

The Dolphin GUI is very very nice to be sure.  It's a real shame that
it didn't catch on more.  For me it would seem like a no brainer for a
small company:  An easy language to use, a fast development
environment.

> Tweak scares me a bit.  The capability is fine (even great), but I have
> reservations about dragging the compiler into it.  I would much rather
> see a higher level GUI editor that uses a time-aware variant of a
> traditional event system for routing.  While I am no big fan of native
> widgets, I would probably opt for something like wxSqueak to force the
> point.

After the previous discussion wouldn't direct rendering be a better
option?  If sig's OpenGL API turns out to be nice maybe that could be
used.  What is really missing is to have the image be able to open
extra native windows.  The same kind of base canvas (or what ever you
call them) windows as now, just more then one.

In a related question, how much can one legally duplicate the look of
Windows/Mac, or is there a legal problem there at all?  It seems a bit
arbitrary to say that you can't make windows that look like native
windows, but you can freely call the OS to do it, no?

> I am glad to see that Andreas fixed some critical threading bugs.  I am
> somewhat surprised that it took so long for them to surface.  How does
> one square that with the popularity of Swikis and other server uses of
> Squeak?  I would have thought they would stress the VM enough to show
> such bugs, but they apparently did not, or worse yet, the community
> largely ignored the problems???  Insights would be appreciated.

I think this was showing up on the Seaside sites from various people,
but it was non-trivial to track down.

> I am not sure how to copy with the loss(??) of Dolphin's overlapped
> threads.  For those not familiar with them, Dolphin provides a way to
> mark external functions to be called on a separate OS thread such that
> only the calling Smalltalk Process is blocked.  With a really good SSL
> Socket implementation, I should be able to wean from them.  By really
> good, I mean that the image cannot hang when a network wire is pulled or
> a machine or DNS entry does not exist.  The calling process should
> block, but not the entire image.

I wonder how hard it would be to add this.