[squeak-dev] [Cuis][Ann] Cuis 3.0 is available

Casey Ransberger casey.obrien.r at gmail.com
Fri Jan 14 21:56:04 UTC 2011


Yeah, the themes themselves are intended to be illustrative. Most of what we did was foundational, rather than artistic. 

This work falls out of some frustrations I had with keeping Polymorph working in trunk. Polymorph is huge, so keeping it working in Squeak was more than I had time for; FWIW, IMHO Polymorph has more work-around than architecture. My sense from working with it is that it came from a time when it was hard to get changes into the core of Squeak. I knew I couldn't realistically keep it up to date with Trunk development, so I resolved to replace it with something smaller. 

Our current themes implementation is *one class* with ancillary support throughout the Cuis Morphic layer. 

Baking this stuff right into the core as a first class citizen is what made the implementation so simple, and it's surprising to find that in some cases this actually seemed to reduce total complexity in (certain very small parts of) Cuis, by separating the concerns of "what color it should be" from "how I generally display myself."

In addition, Cuis' smaller Morphic implementation and smaller total UI surface made prototyping themes a total breeze. The ideation, implementation and integration happened mostly one night while I was feeling sleepless and coded through till the morning. 

Thanks for entertaining my crazy idea, and for all your help with the integration Juan! 

Juan did a lot of cool stuff with this release, but I'd like to highlight a small thing that is to me the worlds greatest gift: when rounded window corners are enabled, *they are antialiased*, so the usual jagged retro rounding that makes me use square corners all the time is finally gone. Hooray!

I'm looking forward to spending some more time on the aesthetic part of the equation in the future. 

If anyone is interested in hacking on themes for Cuis, let me know:) It's pretty easy to do, as Morphic stuff goes. 

On Jan 14, 2011, at 1:02 PM, Igor Stasenko <siguctua at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 14 January 2011 21:28, Juan Vuletich <juan at jvuletich.org> wrote:
>> Juan Vuletich wrote:
>>> 
>>> Hi Folks,
>>> 
>>> A new release of Cuis is available, as usual, at
>>> www.jvuletich.org/Cuis/Index.html . The big news is a completely new, fresh
>>> UI look. Cuis now has the concept of UI themes, and several themes are
>>> included. We must thank Casey Ransberger for all this. He had the original
>>> idea, and did most of the work. I focused on anti aliasing, gradients, and
>>> such. This is not a finished work, most likely we'll be doing cosmetic
>>> tweaks during the next releases. We think it can look even better! (More
>>> details in the Release Notes, at the web page).
>>> 
>>> This release is also the first one to include a lot of work and fun done
>>> specifically for and in Cuis by someone but myself. I want to thank Casey
>>> for the work and the fun! I also want to encourage everybody to use Cuis,
>>> and contribute to it.
>>> 
>>> Do download it and give it a try. You won't be disappointed!
>>> 
>>> The other big news is a new design for the text system: the TextModel and
>>> TextProvider hierarchies comprise the model. TextModelMorph and
>>> BareTextMorph together are the view. This design is simpler, more consistent
>>> and easier to understand. In addition it will allows text models have their
>>> own specific behavior. This might be used (for example) for multi-level
>>> undo, etc. The separation of view and model is not completely clean yet, but
>>> this code is really worth taking a look. While this code was written by
>>> yours truly, it can be published freely by courtesy of Bernhard Pieber and
>>> www.software-generation.com . Thanks Bernhard!
>>> 
> Cool! :)
> 
>>> As usual, there are many smaller enhancements and bug fixes, including a
>>> careful review and cherry picking of latest changes to Squeak trunk.
>>> 
>>> Cheers,
>>> Juan Vuletich
>> 
>> Oh, I forgot to tell. To play with themes, try evaluating (close existing
>> windows and open them anew after theme change):
>> 
>>   Theme beCurrent                                    "New default theme"
>>   ClassicTheme beCurrent                        "Cuis 2.0 like"
>>   BlueTheme beCurrent                            "white on blue soft theme"
>>   GrayTheme  beCurrent                        "MacLike"
>>   DarkTheme beCurrent                         "original, dark, translucent
>> windows, interesting"
>>   HighContrastBlackTheme beCurrent "    White over black, radical look"
>>   HighContrastWhiteTheme beCurrent     "Good for low-contrast screens"
>>  You can also set a bakground image doing something like:
>>   World backgroundImageData: (FileStream readOnlyFileNamed:
>> 'SuSE_Linux_Desktop.jpg') binary contentsOfEntireFile.
>> 
> 
> Colors are a bit odd and some themes lacking consistency..
> But since it can be easily changed now, it is a good start.
> 
> Well done, Juan.
> 
> 
>> Cheers,
>> Juan Vuletich
>> 
>> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Best regards,
> Igor Stasenko AKA sig.
> 



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