>People are saying that they do not want to have the Catalog Projects displayed >by default
Why do you generalize that people wants to have them "not displayed"? It's for people with a slow connection and they lament about the slowdown - not the functionality. For this group it feels slow when opening Spotter - especially when the JSON rertrieved anytime you open it. As I said in the worst case one could put: CatalogSettings displayCatalogProjectsInSpotter: false. into the startup script or change in settings browser if one works on a really slow connection. This is already in latest Pharo image of today. >Another option is to provide an intermediary object. For example, how would it >be if we would dive in the Catalog Browser object from the Menu >category and >be able to search for projects? A possible solution yes - but I dislike that it would again hide the available projects in yet another navigation downpath/sidepath of spotter that one must know and type in advance. Wasn't the idea of Spotter to "just type" without having to know too much context? I think a cache for the catalog projects for the spotter search (that is invalidated at image startup) could solve the problem: When Spotter opens the FIRST time the projects are retrieved, nonetheless all the other items are already displayed. So the catalog projects appear lazy when retrieved (as it is now). For any following search the quick cache projects can be used without slowdowns. The server side of Catalog only updates each 24 hours anyway - so the contents is usually valid for the image session. If there are still people left who (due to a real slow connection) find this initial one-time retrieval annoying then they can disable it as described above. Nonetheless we get really offtopic from the original subject of this thread... Thanks T.
