Daniel Lyons wrote > My impression is that Morphic must have started out as a small and > beautiful core. Otherwise you wouldn't find so many people talking about > how amazing it was in writings dated 10 years ago and earlier
The idea is revolutionary and beautiful - that everything you see on the screen can be dealt with like a physical object in the real world; you would "pick up" a picture from a web page or "pick up" a menu item to anchor to the desktop as easily as you can pick up a file icon and drop it in another folder. It was originally implemented in Self, so "small and beautiful" buzz may have been from that setting. From what I understand, Squeak's Morphic was stuffed with experiments from very early on. Daniel Lyons wrote > I have also heard that Morphic made more sense in its original habitat in > Self, because you really could just clone a UI component and start > customizing it, because Self only has instances, no classes. The "direct > manipulation" argument is slightly sabotaged by the intrusion of a class > hierarchy and textual coding. I have heard that a lot too, but don't think it's really true. If you define the state that makes a morph a morph, why can't you implement a way to save that current state to a subclass or update the current class? It's just that no one's implemented it yet, probably because few people remember the Dynabook and Morphic visions that make direct, live, uniform manipulation important, and the blue plane ideas have degenerated to pink plane "how do we easily make business UIs; not that that's not an important goal, too, but I would hate to forget the revolutionary power we have underneath! ----- Cheers, Sean -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Question-about-Morphic-in-Pharo-4-tp4796331p4796438.html Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
