[Help-smalltalk] FW: A gtk browser for GNU Smalltalk ?

[Bonzini Paolo]

-----Original Message-----
From: Bonzini on behalf of Jan Vrany
Sent: Thu 1/10/2008 3:00 PM
To: Paolo Bonzini
Subject: Re: A gtk browser for GNU Smalltalk ?
 
Well, I can :-) For instance:

1) you cannot select more than one category, class, protocol, method
   -> moving, deleting severa 15 methods one by one is...not very      
   convenient 

2) No tabs. Users likes tabs, or - at least - are used to use tabs
   (from firefox, ctrl-t). 

3) No "main menu" no toolbar. I know, everybody use shortcuts.
   But what about begginers? Where may I learn what actions are
   available? Context menus are good for experienced uses, but
   from the usability view it's bad practice, worse when they
   are the only possiblity to access some finctionality.

4) I like to switch between hierarchy/category "in-place"
   very convenient and hard to implement in OB. 

5) Sunit integration in style of "SUnit Too" - 
   when some class is selected, show additional widgets
   (like run, run profiled, run errors, run failures)

6) Visual profiler integration. I want list in one pane
   and tree widget in another pane. Hard to do. Juraj Kubelka
   and me spent more than 3months to implement such feature
   (still not finished) and we had to patch almost every part of
   OB. 

7) Menus are hard to organize - you cannot specify the order of
   menu items (I might be wrong, there were some changes in menu 
   stuff recently)


Sure, tree is moral equivalent of nested listboxes. But
imagine smalltalk browser with one signle tree on the top
and code pane on bottom. Conceptually, they are equivalent,
but proper use of each of them has significant impact on
usability. 

I don't want to criticize OB at all - is great tool for
prototyping new tools and lot of interesting things has been
done during the developement. But on the other hand,
it is very hard, if possible, to create really convenient
and usable tool. 

Jan





On Thu, 2008-01-10 at 14:19 +0100, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> > I spent some time with Juraj Kubelka to implement
> > some features in Squeak OB, with implementing a bit
> > more complicated browsers using OB and now I'm not 
> > convinced that OB is the best way. 
> 
> Can you expand on the features that lack in the OB framework?  After 
> all, even Eclipse (in the main view) has little more than a tree (which 
> is the moral equivalent of some nested listboxess) and a text pane.
> 
> Paolo