Dear all,
I remember well my first impression with Squeak a year or so ago and all
troubles I had then and have them actually still.
Yes, it is a look&feel problem. And more feel than look. Look are fonts
etc. while feel are menus, basic window handling, mouse buttons,
controls behaving as closer to target OS as user is accustomized of,
user interface consistency and behavior as expected, etc.
I therefore propose to start with "feel" part of user experience first
and my priority would be:
- swapMouseButtons preset depending on target OS (this one is
probably the most annoying thing for newcomers!)
- window controls (minimize/maximize, close) and their order
more in line with mainstream rules
- better menus as Adrian proposed
- more overall consistency of menus (for instance: inspect/explore
always on the same place in menu: or on the top or on the bottom)
- merging inspector into explorer and having only Inspect
- ctrl-mouse left behavior = select! (also very annoying one!)
- do we really need those window controls, coming up with ctrl-left
mouse? (rotate etc? halos?)
Those feel troubles I have are on Linux and mostly the same on Windows
but are probably different on Mac.
Best regards
Janko
Adrian Lienhard wrote:
Hi,
I'd like to get your opinion about how we could improve the GUI. I
believe that even a few small changes will make a significant
difference, especially for new people that come to Pharo. Just the
cleaned up world menu is such a relief...
Here a three suggestions:
Better fonts
----------------
I think the current code font is not a good one and it is too small (for
today's screen resolutions). I like for example the font used in
TextMate, which is Monaco 12, a monotype font. The page
http://www.lowing.org/fonts/ gives some samples for good code fonts.
I've tried out the other fonts in the Pharo image like the
BitstreamVeraSansMono but they are all very blurry. Just not good
enough. I'm not a font expert, so I don't know what the options for a
better font are.
Better menus
-------------------------------
Current problems:
- bad organization menus only work when you have learned where
something is located
- duplicated entries e.g., Appearance is both in the top level world
menu and in the submenu Help
- useless entries e.g., set font, set style etc. in the context
menu are useless since code is never styled
- defective entries: e.g., "Make project link" in the context menu
does not work
Larger windows
-------------------------------
The default size of windows is usually too small. Often, after opening a
window I have to resize it. For example the hierarchy browser shows only
the 5 first classes.
Any other ideas what could be improved in the short term? I'm looking
for stuff that we can do now without having to rewrite the whole system...
Cheers,
Adrian
___________________
http://www.adrian-lienhard.ch/
_______________________________________________
Pharo-project mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project
--
Janko Mivšek
Svetovalec za informatiko
Eranova d.o.o.
Ljubljana, Slovenija
www.eranova.si
tel: 01 514 22 55
faks: 01 514 22 56
gsm: 031 674 565
_______________________________________________
Pharo-project mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project
