I understand the point you are making. I never intended my mails to be of the 'do this now' kind. I am just sharing my experiences and points of view. I have always had strong opinions about UI elements and lately even more since I have been reading up on the topic (because of my work on AspectMaps ). If my comments can be of any use and may be taken into account at some point, great, if not, no problem. I get that this is a work in progress and I am sure you have a lot of other things on your plate, as do we all :-/

(assuming you are replying to both my mails of last saturday, btw)

No problem Johan. Thanks for sharing your experience and using your time to comment on our work. Cheers, Alexandre

On 24 Apr 2011, at 11:52, Dale Henrichs wrote:

...

Johan,

Just one point ... the ui for MetacelloBrowser is not expected to be complete at this point ... I think there are still a number of commands that need to be added before we can start considering what the final ui will look like ... once we have a feel for the set of commands that should be included and the type of work flow we are supporting (neither of which has been decided upon) we will be able to fine tune the ui and there is a lot of work that needs to be done ...

You're comments about the fact that you had difficulty figuring out how to call your #loadDefault method are where we need to be focussing our efforts ... this is a missing piece of functionality that needs to be addressed.

Spiffing up a ui _before_ you've decided on the final set of commands to be supported is the same type of mistake you make when making a premature optimization of an algorithm ...

For me the biggest problem that I struggle with is the number of times that I must break out of the MetacelloBrowser to do work with Monticello Browser windows...I have included a number of commands in the MetacelloBrowser that allow you to perform many of the MonticelloBrowser functions and I see the need to add more ... So I begin thinking that maybe these functions should be incorporated into the MetacelloBrowser ... allow the direct viewing of the repository/history .... I'm also not happy with having to go the browser to see certain bits of information from the Metacello spec (like the description) .... I think we need to incorporate that as well ... We need major improvement in the ui for creating a configuration ... major work needs to be done there ...

... and more ...

Dale On Apr 23, 2011, at 12:57 PM, Johan Fabry wrote:

...

My 2 cents on this topic: user interface consistency cannot be underestimated. I called these 'leds' unit-test icons because thats what they are (in my mind and I guess also for a lot of other people). So using them for anything else is not a good idea at all. Alex' proposal seems (to me) a much better idea.

-- Johan Fabry jfabry@dcc.uchile.cl - http://dcc.uchile.cl/~jfabry PLEIAD Lab - Computer Science Department (DCC) - University of Chile

-- _,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;: Alexandre Bergel http://www.bergel.eu ^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;.