eToys interface showed Smalltalk object browser when clicking on inspect/eye halo button

Just did my first eToys group today. It went really well! After one  
hour, a dozen computers were covered with sprites moving in all kinds  
of ways, covered in turtle trails, making a huge cacophany. The  
students all did more than I expected in the time.

My puzzle is this: I got there an hour before the class, and went  
round all the computers, going to the Squeakland website, and running  
the installer on each of the computers. Identical stpes on 16 computers.

During the group, one of the students called me over. She'd been at  
the computer for five or ten minutes by this point. On this machine,  
when you click on an eToy, click on its eye/inspect halo button,  
rather than the normal eToy inspector, we got what seems to be some  
kind of smalltalk browser. I clicked around a bit, and I couldn't  
find anything in that window that would show the regular eToy  
inspector, nor any other way of bringing up the eToy inspector, nor  
what she might have done to cause this change in behavior.

Comments? (cause/fix/workaround)

Thanks.
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Hi, Guyren,

The problem you encountered on that one machine almost certainly was  
due to that computer's "caps lock" key having been inadvertently  
pushed in.  This resulted in all mouse and keyboard interactions  
being interpreted on that machine as if the SHIFT key were being held  
down.

When the shift key is held down while certain halo handles are  
clicked, you get "alternate" halo actions.  For example, holding the  
shift key down while you click on the magenta halo handle will bring  
up a small color chooser rather than the huge graphical-properties  
sheet.

In the case of the turquoise-eye halo handle, a normal click brings  
up the normal etoy "Viewer", whereas a shift-click brings up a  
Smalltalk "Instance Browser" showing "Universal Tiles", which is what  
you saw on that computer.  I think that probably we had *all* lost  
track of the fact that that feature, a leftover from a demo by a  
colleague years ago, was still in there.  It has no relevance at all  
to current etoy users, and should be, and now will be, removed from  
the system.

Thank you!

Cheers,

   -- Scott

On Nov 6, 2006, at 8:46 PM, Guyren Howe wrote:

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