I was not complaining about Spec, just reporting my experience with the various UI toolkits in Pharo as a relatively newbie to this area of Pharo.

Anyway, as I wrote in my first email, I had difficulties with Spec to go beyond building a standard interface, especially in performing text manipulation (font size) or coloring the background of a string, or encapsulating pieces of text in frames. I tried to understand how to do that, but there is very little documentation on the matter, and the main answer I got was "be prepared to use Morphic".

Trying to understand how to access the properties of the elements I found several comments like:

[talking about font size in Spec]
On 03/10/15 09:24, stepharo wrote:
> I think that this part has been completely forgotten by spec.
> Normally the layout should take into account the size of the label and font
> and I do not see why we could not specify the color and other attributes we want to have but we did not work on this point.
> Now we will have to see that in the context of Brick skin.
>
> Stef

Don't get me wrong, I like Spec, it is just unclear to me if it wants to be the default toolkit to build widgets in Pharo (in this case it should probably access more properties of Morphic), or if wants to be completely engine-agnostic, therefore preferring abstraction over expressiveness.

Tommaso

+1 :)

Offray

On 26/06/16 02:56, stepharo wrote:

+ 1

Stef

Tommaso,

can you give some concrete examples of what it is that you wanted to do to refine your application and that was really hard (or impossible) to do with Spec?

As long as we do not know what is wrong, we cannot fix it.

As long as we do not know what important things are wrong, we cannot prioritize.

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On Jun 25, 2016, at 15:54, Tommaso Dal Sasso <tommaso.dalsasso@gmail.com> wrote:

The beauty that I am looking for as a developer for has to do with the code and the API. I consider important how fast I am able to prototype a working example --in this Spec is excellent-- and how much I can extend the code to refine my application --in this Spec is really hard to use--.