[Squeakfoundation]Visibility in the open source community

[Doug Way]

Matthew Denis Richard Sloly wrote:
> 
> Regarding fonts, I am thinking that it would make Squeak more desirable if it could use existing font libraries for the Mac and PC. For instance, would it be possible for Squeak to read TrueType or OpenType fonts? There are many free ones out there.

Probably in the near term, the Apple fonts will be removed and simply replaced with some other bitmap fonts without the Apple licensing problems.  (Such as the StableSqueak fonts discussed on the squeak-dev list, which include a NewYork-like font as well as others.  Although I don't think a Times-Roman-like font was one of them... a donated Times-Roman-like bitmap font might still be useful.)

But that shouldn't stop us from also adding support for TrueType, antialiased fonts, etc. (although it's not quite as trivial).

> Font design is a very specialized field, but it would not be hard to find someone who would be willing to design a special one, just for Squeak . . . but then again . . . as you put it, "Or are there deeper [technical] reasons that New York still rulez the image?"

There aren't any deeper technical reasons that New York still dominates... it's mostly just inertia.

> I would be happy to help form a team of designers who could act as a resource to the programmers, if there is a demand for such services. Please let me know.

Thanks for this generous offer... a team of designers could be very helpful.  I agree that the Squeak UI is generally somewhat clunky in terms of consistency, but part of this is due to the experimental nature of Squeak... it has a *lot* of UI stuff (windows, widgets, morphs, EToys, etc.) created by a bunch of different people.  There's a lot more stuff in there in terms of random widgets than in most UI's (e.g. Java Swing).

However, the UI look (such as the SystemWindows) has improved modestly from 2.8 to 3.0 to 3.2, if you've been following.  Squeak 2.8 started up in the ancient MVC interface, which is a direct descendent of the original Xerox PARC overlapping windows UI of the 70's, since you mentioned interest in GUI history.

I think that this UI improvement can continue, especially as more people become interested in Squeak for practical uses.

- Doug Way
  dway@riskmetrics.com