>> On 17-05-2018, at 2:40 PM, Chris Muller <asqueaker at gmail.com> wrote:
>> New users' first experience upon launching Squeak should be an
>> immediate commencement of their journey to discovery and wonderment,
>> not a tedious and meaningless (to them) message that tasks
>> them with some chore they couldn't possibly care about at that point.
>
> I have to disagree there; I wouldn't consider it tedious nor meaningless. It's a single dialogue action and an educational moment.

To get to the "Dang moment", you have to have a user who 1) launched
Squeak already, 2) did something which caused them to want to "start
over", 3) then answered "Yes" to the question, "do you want to save
this image?", and then finally, 4) relaunched it only to find the
system did exactly what they asked it to do.   THAT is an educational
moment.  The moment when the user launches Squeak the very FIRST time,
is when they're expecting to be dazzled by Squeak, not have Squeak expecting
something from THEM -- to think up a "name" when they don't even know
yet what it is they're supposed to be naming or why, because they
don't have the context of the "dang moment" yet.

The proposal would distract every new users' "first-kiss moment"
(i.e., the one you never forget), to target these very rare
"dang-moment" cases, and only the ones of those who didn't simply
re-unzip ("clean install"), and only for the very tiny fraction of
their (potential) life with Squeak when they're still "discovering",
before getting their system properly installed for proper long-term
use.

>> Many would bail right then and there.  Personally, I think most users
>> that would use a system like this would know about files and folders
>
> And yet decades of experience of people with little experience trying out Smalltalk systems suggests otherwise to me. Think of it like opening a template document in a word processor.
>
>> and would simply re-unzip it, but if you feel strongly the system
>> should hold their hand then lets actually hold it by handling it for
>> the user *automatically*.   A tweak to the launcher scripts included
>> in the All-In-One.  Simply change the script to make a copy of the
>> "master" and then launch the copy.  If  the copy already exists (i.e.,
>> from last time), launch it instead of copying it over.  Then, we
>> simply include a "factory-reset" script which deletes the copy.  Done.
>
> That would be a perfectly fine approach too. It does prevent the user choosing a name, but that may be positive or negative.

Your proposal would require them to be able to choose a name as well,
but if the user is ready to use multiple images, they've pretty much
graduated from the All-In-One, and ready to move to a proper setup
instead of the demo.  The All-In-One did precisely what it's intended
to, and nothing it isn't.

> It could be implemented in the image rather than us having to write shell equivalent scripts for several systems.

Here it is:

    if [ -f $TEMPIMAGE ]; then
         echo "Welcome to Squeak!"
    else
         cp  $MASTERIMAGE $TEMPIMAGE
    spur $TEMPIMAGE

Please don't put all new users through that question, and complexify
the image to do it.

Best,
  Chris

> Then again, we likley need to do that anyway to cater for 32/64 bit stuff.
>
>
> tim
> --
> tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
> Useful random insult:- S  p  a  c  e  d   o  u  t .
>
>
>