I recently post a change to make TheWorldMenu "open" submenu dynamic. What does that mean? just that between the "web browser" entry, which is still hardwired into TWM, and the "mvc project" entry (likewise), it puts up the contents of a dynamic list that Celeste and IRCChat register into.
It cuts the link from morphic to the applications, which is nice, but the fact that IRC and Celeste are both internet apps is incidental. If we start moving the other entries into the registry, we'll get a mess -
browser (b) mail reader file list web browser ..
you get the idea. This simply depends on the load order, which is simple, but butt-ugly and inconsistent to the user.
BTW, this is a problem we'll have to solve for many instances - the browser list menus, the huge and evil ParagraphEditor menu, the menus for change sets (which still have the mail to list even without Celeste, but what if there's no sockets?)
And those also want a reasonable interaction between dynamic menus and menus that split with "more..."
Daniel
danielv@netvision.net.il wrote:
you get the idea. This simply depends on the load order, which is simple, but butt-ugly and inconsistent to the user.
Well, alphabetizing will help with the former. I don't know about the rest. Surely, however, "changes sorter" and "email reader" should be in separate areas of the menu.
Really, which morphs are special enough to be "apps", anyway? As opposed to "tools" or just regular "morphs"? If the question is unanswerable, perhaps we could move everything into the "objects" browser and simplify things a bit.
I dunno. How to arrange everything seems to lead back to the question of what Squeak is, exactly.
Lex
Hi
I was thinking about the problem of the world menu as this introduces a lot of dependencies we will have to deal with. Here is an idea that I did not have the time to implement.
We could have a kind of description based on symbol of how the menus should look like. These descriptions could be used by central registration mechanism to produce menus that are dynamic but can follow a certain structure described by the menu description. The menu does not really have to be fully dynamic but just recreated every times a new module is loaded or unloaded.
Stef
On Monday, May 27, 2002, at 06:47 PM, Lex Spoon wrote:
danielv@netvision.net.il wrote:
you get the idea. This simply depends on the load order, which is simple, but butt-ugly and inconsistent to the user.
Well, alphabetizing will help with the former. I don't know about the rest. Surely, however, "changes sorter" and "email reader" should be in separate areas of the menu.
Really, which morphs are special enough to be "apps", anyway? As opposed to "tools" or just regular "morphs"? If the question is unanswerable, perhaps we could move everything into the "objects" browser and simplify things a bit.
I dunno. How to arrange everything seems to lead back to the question of what Squeak is, exactly.
Lex
squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org