[UI] Squeak UI guidelines/heuristics

[Brad Fuller]

On Fri August 24 2007, David Mitchell wrote:
> I noticed the wyoGuide is released under the wxWindows license, which
> is essentially LGPL and should make it a friendly base from which to
> fork. I presume a fork would be necessary as I doubt wxWindows is
> particularly Squeaky.

The very first issue I have with xyoGuide is it does not seem to focus on user 
interface issues, but on how things should look and should be. What I mean by 
that is, take Chapter 2 for instance. It starts out with a description and 
picture of an example application with the text:

"A frame layout usually has some standard elements like title bar, menu, 
optional toolbars, optional status bar, etc."

Pictures are great, but presuming that a user interface would usually consist 
of a menu bar, with a File Menu, Edit Menu, etc. is dangerous, and  is how 
the HCI world got into the mess it's in.(Ok, they said "usually", so they are 
a bit off the hook)

So, in their case, BookMorph violates this very first premise. But, to me, 
BookMorph is a clean interface and serves the user very well.