"Icons that show different concepts (and calling super and overriding a method are entirely different concepts, as well as putting a breakpoint or deprecating a method) and that hide each other are evil."
Absolutely agree, hence that design. And in any case calling super is a stupid indicator, especially when you know that it doesn't check that the super call is a) to the same method or b) on every call path. The indicator actually means 'might call some method declared in a superclass', which of course you can easily do by calling a method that isn't overridden in the declaring class, so what the hell use is that?
Thank you for expressing it that clearly ;-)
OB is a good prototype, although IMO
I disagree. I exclusively use OB in productive development on a daily bases for over 2 years now.
b) shouldn't include any action abstraction because that's best handled in a completely different and system-wide fashion;
I disagree. OB provides this system-wide abstraction. It is the fault of the other tools that don't use these abstractions. For example, I've written a process browser, debugger, inspector and several other tools in OB and they all benefit from the commands that already exist and that other people write as extensions (e.g. open a hierarchy browser from within the debugger). I agree that the abstraction is not optimal in all cases (e.g. text commands, applicability tests, ...), but it is definitely better than anything else I've seen so far.
different and system-wide fashion; c) is too messily tied to Morphic, with a number of hacks; and relatedly, d) shouldn't extend existing Morphic controls (such as lists) because they come with too much baggage (i.e. being all things to all people).
Earlier versions of OB were entirely separated from Morphic. Unfortunately it was tied to morphic over time as more and more people joined the development. I guess this happend due to laziness and lack of documentation and knowledge. Along the same lines: Every line of the model and view used to be tested with in-depth SUnit-Tests. Unfortunately that is not the case anymore either. People add features without writing tests. This is what happens, when an appealing and widely adapted projects entirely lacks a form of leadership. At some point there was an AJAX based web view and a XUL interface. I think somebody even made GTK view. Earlier versions of OB run in GemStone, with the view running in Squeak Morphic. There is an ongoing port for GST. Cheers, Lukas -- Lukas Renggli http://www.lukas-renggli.ch