direct manipulation UI construction was Re: [squeak-dev] Squeak Vision ~2000

David Corking lists at dcorking.com
Wed Mar 30 16:44:45 UTC 2011


Jason,

On Tue, Mar 29, 2011, Casey Ransberger wrote:
> WRT Morphic and direct user interface construction: this isn't fantasy. You
> can actually do this today, as it was one of the original drivers for the
> system when it was conceived in Self, as an evolution of Randall Smith's
> Smalltalk based Alternate Reality Toolkit (ARK.)

I agree with Casey: it is not fantasy.

However, with Squeak / Pharo, direct manipulation gets you _instances_
of morphs. To fit the Smalltalk programming paradigm, you need a class
and methods (at least a drawOn: method, but probably some event
handlers too.) Direct manipulation doesn't quite get you the code (in
the way Interface Builder does.)

But ...

(1) You can probably figure out the code using an inspector and a
little arithmetic.

(2) Morphic Players get real Smalltalk code behind them that you can
see in your changeset browser.

(3) Have you seen this yet?
http://www.jarober.com/blog/blogView?showComments=true&printTitle=ST_4U_53:_Introducing_the_Morphic_UI_Designer&entry=3476333796

David



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