On 25 June 2018 at 21:49, Tim Mackinnon <tim@testit.works> wrote: > Hi - I don’t want to case a UI war, particularly as I was very impressed > with Denis’ presentation about Calypso at the PharoDays conference last > year. >
I'm also very much enjoying Calypso. Especially the multiple tabs for the code pane and being able to peak at the class definition half way through editing a method. > Now that I’ve made a concerted effort to try and use Calypso, and in > general like it, I do however find that the bar of Radio Buttons above the > tabs is a bit overwhelming and I’m wondering if there might be something we > can do to help make it less so? > > I’m sure the problem is the age old observation that a checkbox or button > that toggles between states is difficult to understand whether its on or > off and what the alternate state is - so this is why we now have a row of 8 > radio buttons. > > But 8 is a lot of radio buttons… which I find visually hard to parse and > often find the order of the buttons the opposite to what I expect - eg. > When I want to see class methods I keep pausing over that group to see > which one to click (for some reason I keep thinking the class one should be > before the instance one - not sure if anyone else notices this). > > I’m also not overly keen on the terminology of “side” (as in class side, > vs inst. side) and equally I question abbreviations like: Hier. Inst. Refs. > > Can we not just get rid of that bar completely - and put little icon > buttons next to the filter field for pkg/project and flat/hierarchy ? > It would be interesting to see an experiment that replaced that bar with tabs above each pane: Pane 1: [Packages][Projects] tabs Pane 2: [Flat][Hierarchy] tabs Pane 3: [Instance][Class] tabs** Pane 4: [Method][Variables] tabs If 3[Instance] > 4[Variables] would show class-variables... instance-variables... and 3[Class] > 4[Variables] would show class-variables... class-instance-variables... this could help familiarize newcomers with the scope of these terms. cheers -ben > OR given the method pane is now a tree and it already has an entry > “instance side” - why not just have entries for “instance methods” and > “class methods” and just expand accordingly? We also now have a tab “Inst. > side method” - why not 2 tabs “+instance method” and “+class method”. It > breaks a bit with regular smalltalk browser conventions - but I think > Calypso has already pushed the boat out on all this anyway in favour of > improved navigation and ease of typing code. > > My understanding is that this is all pretty doable with the mechanism > Denis has put in place. I’m tempted to have a look, but thought I’d see > what that general feeling is here, as maybe I’m on my own here. > > Tim >
