Morphic

Hi,

can anybody here tell me why Squeak seems to be the only Smalltalk that
uses Morphic as its UI framework?

It took me months until last night when I watched a video about Self
that I finally understood what Morphic is.

It basically takes the incremental way of writing a program to include
the UI, which is exactly where other STs stop short. They all use some
sort of view composer, you still can do the business logic while the
program is already running but not the UI.

Sorry, it certainly took me a while to get it. :-)

Günther

Günther,

> can anybody here tell me why Squeak seems to be the only Smalltalk that
> uses Morphic as its UI framework?

Preface: Squeak has an arguably very open license, is highly portable,
free, and it's a robust Smalltalk system.  There is a lot to like.

Squeak's Morphic is contains more than a little dry rot.  Squeak has
long suffered from "management" that cares much more about bleeding edge
creation of languages than it does about providing a stable platform for
development of other software.  The result is that "small stuff"
frequently does not get fixed, and there is a lot of finger pointing
with plenty of blame to go around.

Many good things are happening to Squeak, and there are various projects
that offer Squeak, Dolphin and VW packages, so hopefully a good
portabilty layer will eventually surface.



> It took me months until last night when I watched a video about Self
> that I finally understood what Morphic is.

Not to criticize you, but that has not been kept secret.  I believe the
Back to the Future paper discusses it.  Whether there, in Guzdial and
Rose, or elsewhere, it's been documented for some time.


> It basically takes the incremental way of writing a program to include
> the UI, which is exactly where other STs stop short. They all use some
> sort of view composer, you still can do the business logic while the
> program is already running but not the UI.

Any GUI can collapse during incremental development; it gets all the
more fun when the IDE runs in the same windowing system =:0  Morphic
certainly has its strong points, but also needs a lot of attention to
the feel (which is **TERRIBLE**) of its user interface.  The look isn't
all that great either, but that can be addressed more easily.

Morphic is a great simulation environment.  It's a shame that it has not
yet been used to simulate a good user interface with a rich set of
widgets :(   While I do not subscribe to the conventional wisdom that
native widgets are better and faster than their emulated counterparts, I
suspect that wxSqueak will help Morphic.

Have a good one,

Bill

--
Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D.
[hidden email]

Bill,



Bill Schwab wrote:
Well as you probably know by now, I'm a bit slow ....  ;-)

>
> Any GUI can collapse during incremental development; it gets all the
> more fun when the IDE runs in the same windowing system =:0  Morphic
> certainly has its strong points, but also needs a lot of attention to
> the feel (which is **TERRIBLE**) of its user interface.  The look isn't
> all that great either, but that can be addressed more easily.
>

true, but, that seems to me to be a problem of the *implementation* not
the idea itself. The idea is that a visual object is as *live* as any
other object and can directly manipulated. In any other ST environment
you have to halt everything, modify the GUI, and then start again.

I mean one of the many benefits of any Smalltalk environment is that
everything is live, that there is no conventional edit-compile-run-debug
cycle. But that is only true for your business logic, and stops when it
comes to visual objects.

There are so many things in Squeak made possible because of Morphic, and
yes I agree, the actual implementation is a problem.

Dolphin does have its own league of very capable Smalltalkers, isn't
there one who has given the Morphic idea some thought?


Günther

"Günther Schmidt" <[hidden email]> wrote in message
news:[hidden email]...
> ...
> true, but, that seems to me to be a problem of the *implementation* not
> the idea itself. The idea is that a visual object is as *live* as any
> other object and can directly manipulated. In any other ST environment you
> have to halt everything, modify the GUI, and then start again.

Actually you can edit a live GUI in Dolphin through the inspectors. I
sometimes do this to test out a new menu item - use the Visual Object Finder
to locate a particular shell (click over the caption). In the resulting
inspector locate the view aspect. If you expand this out you will see it is
exactly the same as the presentation you see in the View Composer, and you
can edit the view in the same way, even using the Menu Composer if you want.
In Dolphin 6 we had originally planned to allow the ViewComposer to be
attached to a live running instance so that it can be edited. This is a
relatively simple step to take, but is just one feature too many in terms of
getting it finished.

(For those with D6 b1 you can attach a VC to a running view like this:
    Smalltalk developmentSystem openViewComposerEmpty composingView:
myShellView isOwned: false
You can edit the view after a fashion, but it will behave a bit oddly).

As I say this is not by any means unique to Morphic. It's probably some what
harder to do in Dolphin because of the use of native widgets, but in fact
most of what is required has already been done to support the existing view
composition method - the VC edits live instances, not mock UI.

Regards

Blair

> In Dolphin 6 we had originally planned to allow the ViewComposer to be
> attached to a live running instance so that it can be edited. This is a
> relatively simple step to take, but is just one feature too many in terms of
> getting it finished.

> (For those with D6 b1 you can attach a VC to a running view like this:
>     Smalltalk developmentSystem openViewComposerEmpty composingView:
> myShellView isOwned: false
> You can edit the view after a fashion, but it will behave a bit oddly).

Excellent !!!, i thought about this a lot of time.
It's extremely useful because someone can see GUI changes at run time
and commit good ones.

Regards Bruno

Hi Gunther,
 
> It took me months until last night when I watched a video about Self
> that I finally understood what Morphic is.

I'd very much like to see this video. Is it on-line? If so, is there any
chance you could post the URL to it. Thanks

Cheers

Barry Carr

http://www.smalltalk.org.br/movies/

Barry Carr wrote:

Thanks Arie

A very interesting video. Thanks once again.