Eric Arseneau wrote:
[ snip ! ]
Perhaps both could be done, but it seems to me to be a waste of time to write code to make Squeak look like another operating system.
Web browsing presents a quite different UI to most OSs, and offers at least a chance that we can force open the door to something better. One of the things I particularly dislike about all the .NET BS is the transparent attempt by M$ to make the web look like windows. Yuck.
One of the great advantages of writing Squeak code to emulate the OS widgets is that it then allows us to include innovation with the status quo. We can deliver a package that uses the standard run of the mill UI. But then, at the flick of a switch we can change it to a much more intuitive UI. This allows the users to be drawn in and appreciate the app itself, and then find that there are better and more efficient ways to work with it, once they have become dependent on the app.
This would be a great place to put in a reference to a paper that was apparently written by some of the ParcPlace folks who then went on to Sun to build Swing. A shame that I don't have that handy, so if you could kindly read my mind...
I mention this because one of the issues that was raised in the paper, which was about re-implementing VW's GUI code, was that it was hard to keep up with the changes made by OS vendors, and that the emulated widgets would be close, but too often not quite close enough. If I recall, they set out to build a solution, using pattern-oriented development, in which they had both native and emulated widgets on all OS platforms- the emulated widgets could then pick up the slack as VW was moved to an OS where a given widget was not available, while ordinarily one would be using native widgets.
- les
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