Thanks a lot for your feedback. Stef On Nov 17, 2009, at 8:49 AM, Michael van der Gulik wrote:

Hi.

Here's some feedback for Pharo. I've been using Squeak 3.10, but because I want to use the NewCompiler, I'm going to move development of SecureSqueak to Pharo.

I go to http://pharo.org/. Woops. He he. I find my way to the Pharo home page.

Getting Pharo up and running could be a lot easier; I'm using Ubuntu Linux, and I got it up and running quickly because I've a fairly experienced Squeak developer. If I was less familiar with image files and VMs, I would be lost and probably give up.

I recommend making the release for each platform one large .zip file containing the images, sources and VM. This will reduce confusion, and if you put the executable in the root directory of the zip file, most people will easily be able to work it out.

The VM has a README file - good, but it assumes a lot of experience from the user. Again, if I was not a programmer, I'd be lost.

The image zip file has a lot of extra stuff in it (fonts?) and no README file.

I start up the VM - I get a white window, the Pharo logo and that's it. I'm able to just jump in and start using this because I'm familiar with Squeak, but if I was a new user to Pharo, this would be rather intimidating. I recommend having a workspace with nicely formatted fonts saying "Welcome to Pharo, go read Pharo by Example".

The project menu / desktop menu / whatever menu that comes up is badly formatted. The last four items ("Save", "Save As", "Save and quit" and "Quit") have icons and more spacing between them than the items above them. The vertical size of each menu item should be constant. Menu entries still use the small font that Squeak uses, making them hard to click on (for fumble-fingers like me).

The menu structure is a vast improvement over Squeak!

I open up a browser. It looks nice, but I can't understand the red/yellow/green buttons in the top left corner. What are they meant to be? The tooltips help, but I find it odd to use coloured buttons.

I use a slowish Celeron-based computer (if you could call 1.6 BILLION operations per second slow!). The whole environment feels a bit sluggish. I spend some time in the preferences and manage to make it a bit more reactive by disabling some eye-candy.

I come across a dialog: "Changes have not been saved, bla bla". The dialog is odd; it needs the attention of a graphic designer. It has a text entry box in it for no reason?

I make a class and begin typing in its comment; I get continuous annoying drop-down lists which aren't relevant for documentation. The text is badly lagged; I count 5 seconds before what I type appears on the screen.

I get a dialog asking me for my full name (nice! Much better than initials). The text in the dialog is badly aligned and not word-wrapped correctly. Text should be left-aligned or fully justified, unless it's Right-to-Left text. Also, use real right-arrows! Pharo supports Unicode! The dialog did not appear until after I had already made three classes - surely it should ask for my name as soon as I start making any source changes to the system?

I type in some code. The auto-drop-down thing keeps guessing what I'm typing, even when I'm typing comments. It is starting to annoy me. Some more time disabling preferences seems to fix this.

I think that's enough for now. The new user experience needs to be worked on, in particular by making the downloading and setting up more intuitive, and by having a welcome message when the image is started.

Perhaps the auto-completion stuff works better on faster computers. The environment is a lot better after disabling it.

Gulik.

-- http://gulik.pbwiki.com/ _______________________________________________ Pharo-project mailing list Pharo-project@lists.gforge.inria.fr http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project