Johan,
I will be replying separately to your other email on Saturday .. . the
one below was written before I read your other email:)
Frankly I am embarassed by the current state of the configuration
construct steps ... and I am sad that you wasted some of your time
trying out something that I knew was pretty broken...
Your feedback is very welcome and to be honest your efforts have spurred
me to focus on solving the construction problem before moving too far
forward ...
I was hoping for feedback on using the MetacelloBrowser for things not
related to creating the initial configuration, but it is obvious from
your experience (and others) creating that initial configuration is the
thing that folks are looking for when opening up the MetacelloBrowser...
In the end this is a good thing so I do appreciate your effort ...
I know that UIs bring out the strong opinions of folks and have tried to
stay out of the ui/gui business for Metacello, but my own storng
opinions won't let me:)
Thank you very much ...
Dale
On 04/25/2011 11:00 AM, Johan Fabry wrote:
Hi Dale,
I understand the point you are making. I never intended my mails to
be of the 'do this now' kind. I am just sharing my experiences and
points of view. I have always had strong opinions about UI elements
and lately even more since I have been reading up on the topic
(because of my work on AspectMaps ). If my comments can be of any use
and may be taken into account at some point, great, if not, no
problem. I get that this is a work in progress and I am sure you have
a lot of other things on your plate, as do we all :-/
(assuming you are replying to both my mails of last saturday, btw)
On 24 Apr 2011, at 11:52, Dale Henrichs wrote:
Johan,
Just one point ... the ui for MetacelloBrowser is not expected to
be complete at this point ... I think there are still a number of
commands that need to be added before we can start considering what
the final ui will look like ... once we have a feel for the set of
commands that should be included and the type of work flow we are
supporting (neither of which has been decided upon) we will be able
to fine tune the ui and there is a lot of work that needs to be
done ...
You're comments about the fact that you had difficulty figuring out
how to call your #loadDefault method are where we need to be
focussing our efforts ... this is a missing piece of functionality
that needs to be addressed.
Spiffing up a ui _before_ you've decided on the final set of
commands to be supported is the same type of mistake you make when
making a premature optimization of an algorithm ...
For me the biggest problem that I struggle with is the number of
times that I must break out of the MetacelloBrowser to do work with
Monticello Browser windows...I have included a number of commands
in the MetacelloBrowser that allow you to perform many of the
MonticelloBrowser functions and I see the need to add more ... So I
begin thinking that maybe these functions should be incorporated
into the MetacelloBrowser ... allow the direct viewing of the
repository/history .... I'm also not happy with having to go the
browser to see certain bits of information from the Metacello spec
(like the description) .... I think we need to incorporate that as
well ... We need major improvement in the ui for creating a
configuration ... major work needs to be done there ...
... and more ...
Dale On Apr 23, 2011, at 12:57 PM, Johan Fabry wrote:
My 2 cents on this topic: user interface consistency cannot be
underestimated. I called these 'leds' unit-test icons because
thats what they are (in my mind and I guess also for a lot of
other people). So using them for anything else is not a good idea
at all. Alex' proposal seems (to me) a much better idea.
-- Johan Fabry [email protected] - http://dcc.uchile.cl/~jfabry
PLEIAD Lab - Computer Science Department (DCC) - University of Chile
