Agreed. UI frameworks are an officially certified Hard Problem. :) Julian On 10/29/10, Andres Valloud <avalloud@cincom.com> wrote:
One such difficult problem would be to make a visually compelling UI framework, fully capable of supporting and deploying real production applications.
On 10/29/2010 1:35 AM, Julian Fitzell wrote:
On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 8:47 AM, Andres Valloud<avalloud@cincom.com> wrote:
Its not just appearance Andres, it's the complete User eXperience: intuitiveness, ease of use, productivity, fun factor as well as the look and feel. A lot of progress has already been made in this area, but there is still a long way to go because most Smalltalk IDE's have not evolved that much since the 70's ... that's probably part of why Smalltalk is being treated like a black and white movie :)
But see, I'm already sold, so I just don't see the point :)... IMO, we will make the most progress in this area by concentrating our efforts on the difficult problems. It makes me happy to see people concerned with how to make an image from scratch, for example.
As someone who spends much of my time dealing with Smalltalk users, customers, and prospects, I can say that it *does* matter to most people. Solving difficult problems is a very valuable thing to do, but without doing it in an environment that is broadly appealing (visually, UX, etc. as Geert says) Smalltalk will never have any chance of being more than a tiny niche (think of WinAmp or VLC - neither would have been successful without attractive, intuitive user interfaces, even though the real reason I used/use them was for the really practical features).
Julian
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