First Impressions

First impressions, after a few hours wandering around in D6.

There's a lot here to like.  I find the improvements to the base library more
important than the IDE changes (after all, I like the current IDE -- or at
least, I like the current IDE with my own extensions in place).  Full blocks,
tri-state boolean presenters, socket streams with a working #upToEnd, the death
of the unlamented MultipleSelectionListView, ...

But of all the IDE changes I think that multiple-selection method lists, and
auto-complete will make most difference to the way I work.

I didn't find any significant problems running the IDE on Win2K, which is good
news.  I understand OA's position (at least as described by Blair), but I would
prefer to see Dolphin tested on Win2k, at least minimally, and would happily
loose features (or wait longer for them) in return for a development
environment that didn't treat W2K as if it were an obsolete OS.

I think the Ideaspace is a good concept, and works well.  I suspect that I
won't end up using them much, though, for a very specific reason -- which might
be worth considering as an enhancement request (I haven't raised an actual
request for this yet, I'll wait to see what other people think).  The problem
is that I open other tools from within my normal working CHBs for two different
categories of reason.  I may want another long-lived CHB in which to work on
another class related to the same overall task (in which case it is entirely
correct to open in the enclosing Ideaspace), but I also very often open new
CHBs just to check some detail of another class (more usually by <ctrl>B over a
classname), and I /don't/ want those rather transient and "off-topic", as it
were, CHBs included in the Ideaspace.  It similar to the way that in Firefox I
will open new pages in another tab of the same browser window, or in a brand
new browser, depending on the relationship between the pages.  So the way I'd
/like/ to be able to use Idea is that new tools open in top-level windows by
default, but if I (say) control-click a tool icon, then it should open in the
same space.

Incidentally, when a workspace is embedded in an Ideaspace, you can't see
whether it has been modified unless that WS is the current tab.  (Raised as a
bug)

Autocomplete -- in general I like it.  I have quite a few things to say on the
subject so I'll make a separate post.

The slidey tabs in the CHB and VC.  They work /brilliantly/ in the VC, rather
less so in the CHB.  I've already responded in Ian's thread on this subject,
but I don't see a bug-report raised so I'll do so now.  (BTW, it'd be nice if
the problem-report page reported back the issue numbers so that we could quote
them here).  A very minor suggestion about the slidey view in general is that I
think the pin/unpin icons could do with explanatory hover-text -- but that
might be more effort than it's worth (also raised as an ER).

Also related to the slidey version of the CHB: when that is in use there is
/no/ feedback about what categories a method is in -- I think that's an
important omission.  (I haven't raised this as a bug yet -- I'll wait and see
how the slidey-CHB debate goes.)

I'm curious to know what's happened to package 'Gdiplus Image View'.  That
doesn't seem to be included in the distro, although the main GDI+ package is.
Has its functionality been subsumed in the main package, or is it's omission
just an oversight ?  BTW, whatever the story on 'Gdiplus Image View', I'd like
to ask OA to include its loose methods Bitmap>>drawEdge:edge:grlFlags: and
UserLibrary>>drawEdge:qrc:edge:grlFlags: in the base image -- they have nothing
to do with GDI+, but are useful in general. (Raised as an ER).

A general question about the IDE tools.  They all seem to have a narrow bar of
colour just below the toolbar.  On my (Win2K) system that colour is a sort of
dusty light blue (not unlike a mouldy fruit), and it looks pretty crap.  Even
on WinXP it wouldn't blend with my colour scheme.  Is it intended to pick up
the actual colours that I use perhaps ?  (I can imagine that maybe it is, but
that that is failing on Win2K).   Actually, I can't think what it's for -- I've
removed it from one or two of the tools, and they all look better without it.
I don't want to have to do that by hand to all the tools on every release of
Dolphin, though.  I haven't raised a bug report yet, because I don't yet
understand what they are for, and whether the poor appearance is
Win2K-specific.

I haven't yet attempted to load any of my own code into D6 -- more later...

    -- chris