Look at spotter. It is not super fancy, but it has all the margins done right, it does not have extra borders and all this little details. If you have seen Brick widgets they have all the nice proportions, they are not over encumbered by details, they have nice animations, they have nice gamma. There are small details everywhere.
Ok, maybe I���ve exaggerated with ���ugly���, but when I was deciding between Pharo and Squeak (I had to choose what will I use for my programming class), I opened Squeak, saw the strange greenish background, some mouse face, and windows with the style of 90s. Then I opened Pharo and it had this OS X-ish look so definitely I choose Pharo. Now style guides have changed. We have dropped watery look of OS-X but now we have turned into OS9 with all the rectangular gray widgets.
I know that we don���t have designers to inverted something cool, but what GT teem did is they took Google material design guidelines and implemented widgets in Pharo, so if I use them it will be pleasant to the user���s eye. Otherwise we are saying how cool Pharo is and how good we are, but a random Android developer can build nicer interface because they have this sexy widgets.
And yes, in the end for me the big turn off with Spec is the direct example with Tommaso. You know that something is wrong, so you want to change the size of a font. And then you ask on the mailing list and it turns out that it���s not that easy and you have to either hack something, or submit patch to Spec��� In the end I���ve decided to use plain morphic because at least there I can change whatever I want.
Uko
Hi Uko,
just wondering: for you, what makes Spec UI���s ugly? And also, what are the features that are missing that require magic? I don���t understand your example either, sorry :-(
But when you take Spec and build a UI it is ugly. And it is very painful to change it. You cannot say `model title size: model title size * 1.5`, you have to do some magic.