On 25 June 2018 at 21:49, Tim Mackinnon <tim@testit.works> wrote:
Hi - I donât want to case a UI war, particularly as I was very impressed with Denisâ presentation about Calypso at the PharoDays conference last year.
I'm also very much enjoying Calypso. Especially the multiple tabs for the code pane and being able to peak at the class definition half way through editing a method.
Now that Iâve made a concerted effort to try and use Calypso, and in general like it, I do however find that the bar of Radio Buttons above the tabs is a bit overwhelming and Iâm wondering if there might be something we can do to help make it less so?
Iâm sure the problem is the age old observation that a checkbox or button that toggles between states is difficult to understand whether its on or off and what the alternate state is - so this is why we now have a row of 8 radio buttons.
But 8 is a lot of radio buttons⦠which I find visually hard to parse and often find the order of the buttons the opposite to what I expect - eg. When I want to see class methods I keep pausing over that group to see which one to click (for some reason I keep thinking the class one should be before the instance one - not sure if anyone else notices this).
Iâm also not overly keen on the terminology of âsideâ (as in class side, vs inst. side) and equally I question abbreviations like: Hier. Inst. Refs.
Can we not just get rid of that bar completely - and put little icon buttons next to the filter field for pkg/project and flat/hierarchy ?
It would be interesting to see an experiment that replaced that bar with tabs above each pane: Pane 1: [Packages][Projects] tabs Pane 2: [Flat][Hierarchy] tabs Pane 3: [Instance][Class] tabs** Pane 4: [Method][Variables] tabs If 3[Instance] > 4[Variables] would show class-variables... instance-variables... and 3[Class] > 4[Variables] would show class-variables... class-instance-variables... this could help familiarize newcomers with the scope of these terms. cheers -ben
OR given the method pane is now a tree and it already has an entry âinstance sideâ - why not just have entries for âinstance methodsâ and âclass methodsâ and just expand accordingly? We also now have a tab âInst. side methodâ - why not 2 tabs â+instance methodâ and â+class methodâ. It breaks a bit with regular smalltalk browser conventions - but I think Calypso has already pushed the boat out on all this anyway in favour of improved navigation and ease of typing code.
My understanding is that this is all pretty doable with the mechanism Denis has put in place. Iâm tempted to have a look, but thought Iâd see what that general feeling is here, as maybe Iâm on my own here.
Tim