[UI] Squeak UI guidelines/heuristics

[Jason Johnson]

On 8/25/07, tim Rowledge <tim at rowledge.org> wrote:
>
> As it happens I was one of the reviewers of the original CUA
> documents waaaaaay back. It was certainly comprehensive - in my
> opinion far too comprehensive.

Isn't it always with IBM? :)

> Morphic is a reasonable implementation technology but many of the
> current widgets built with Morphic are nasty. It would be nice to see
> a better bottom layer (under morphic unless anyone wants to rewrite
> everything) that can take advantage of OS facilities for accelerated
> graphics; Sophie has been using a binding to the Cairo libraries for
> example. Tweak has many interesting points but the version Sophie has
> been using (and I have no idea how out of date it might be) has been
> the cause of much gnashing of teeth when trying to debug or work out
> wtf is happening when.
>
>
> tim

Yes, with my MVP suggestion I don't mean Morphic couldn't be used.  In
Dolphin (sorry to harp on it, but it's the best I've ever seen) the
view part really feels like a black box, at least to me.  I never
understood how to create a new widget, and based on how some of the
"goodies" widgets looked I don't know if there even was a clean way.

So if we had the mechanisms set up for the Model and Presenter objects
to communicate to the View space then Morphic or anything else would
work as the view.

Then we could have a tabbed "chooser" view for selecting Morphs for
your GUI you're building.  If you create a new Morph you can select
what kind of Morph it is and it shows up in the GUI builder after
that.

I think Tim's idea of cataloging what is there is good.  And when we
catagorize we would also need to look at implementations so we can
document which ones are good to go, and which ones are good in concept
only but need a rewrite.