Hi Marcel,


> On Jul 11, 2016, at 3:38 AM, marcel.taeumel <Marcel.Taeumel at hpi.de> wrote:
> 
> Bert Freudenberg wrote
>> On Sat, Jul 9, 2016 at 12:46 AM, Eliot Miranda &lt;
> 
>> eliot.miranda@
> 
>> &gt;
>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> I *hate* the grey.
>> 
>> +1
>> 
>> - Bert -
> 
> Hi there.
> 
> It seems that setting up custom backgrounds seems to be too difficult.

Mouse over help somewhere in the menu bar or screen background that pointed to drag and drop would be an improvement, but see below what I think is the key deficiency.

> There
> is, obviously, no way to capture the taste of any possible user with a
> default background. So, we might want to provide some alternatives. Hmmm...
> 
> For a single project, you can just drag-drop any picture into Squeak, then
> right-click and choose "Set as background". This way seems to be useful
> because many of our students configured their desktops quite nicely.

The problem is that new projects do not inherit the background of the project in which they are created, being created in the system default.  So if one drags and drops something one likes this effort must be repeated did every new project.  This is a key bug.

> You can also choose any color as you project background. Is this difficult
> to discover?

Again solid colours stink.  The textured backgrounds have much more appeal.  IIRC there is also some straightforward performance work on erasing the background for dragging whole Windows when a picture has been set as background.  Setting a picture as background can scaled to fit.  IIRC every redraw, and hence on drag, this scaling is redone, instead of caching the scaled background once per project. [this may be only in a prototype scale-to-fit I hacked up of it may be in trunk, can't remember, & using my phone).
 
> Anyway, there is no reason why we couldn't provide a set of three (?)
> alternative patterns for the default background. Maybe as simple as
> switching between uniform window colors and colorful windows.

Sure, but include the 4.5 background as an option too please.  It's small, has a nice texture and is unobtrusive and not grey.  Also, make new projects default their background to that of the current, please.

And thanks for being understanding!

> Best,
> Marcel

Eliot
_,,,^..^,,,_ (phone)