Why does the Squeak interface look and act so antiquated?

Asked Jun 04 '09 at 06:53

Active Nov 08 '09 at 23:16

Viewed 1,249 times

Don't get me wrong - I love Smalltalk, but...

To me, the Squeak interface is one of the biggest turnoffs. I love Smalltalk - not the user interface. One only has to contrast modern interfaces like GNOME, MacOS X, and Windows Vista with their combination of ease of use and visually pleasing eye-candy with Squeak's flat 2-D cartoony 16-color (or is it 256 colors?) interface.

Aren't we ever going to see modern user interface design put into Squeak?

Or am I missing something entirely and the current crop of computer user interfaces are all wrong?

asked Jun 04 '09 at 06:53

Mei

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Historical information : Pharos 1.0, a fork of Squeak, was recently released, and is intended to be "professional looking" out of the box. – Warren P Apr 16 '10 at 18:07
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I have to add: Squeak 4.1 was also recently released and it, too, is "professional looking" out of the box :) – Frank Shearar May 01 '10 at 18:57
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This question is based on a version of squeak that is now out of date. Squeak 4.1 looks fabulous. I retract my previous comment, as it is incorrect. – Warren P May 28 '10 at 18:40

6 Answers6

Use one of the many alternative UIs instead of the default look & feel. Pharo's looks a lot like OSX, for instance.

Ramon Leon has another article, Fixing Squeak's Sesame Street Looking Windows, there's Zurgle, and probably a lot more others, announced periodically on squeak-dev.

answered Jun 04 '09 at 12:29

Frank Shearar

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Pharo looks phenomenal - and I like the direction it is taking. Only first learned of it just very recently (here on StackOverflow!). Unfortunately, the screen shots associated with both Ramon's article and Zurgle are missing. – Mei Jun 04 '09 at 14:50
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Pharo is not an alternative GUI, but a full-out fork. – Matthew Flaschen Jun 04 '09 at 21:36
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A full-out fork that uses a UI that looks rather different to Squeak's. Perhaps I should have said "Pharo's UI looks a lot like OSX". – Frank Shearar Jun 08 '09 at 16:20
Only by default. The theme support supports a "Win2k" like look, a "vistary" (vistalike) theme, and a "watery" (guess who?) theme. – Warren P Apr 16 '10 at 18:05
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Indeed. And the new default theme for Squeak 4.1 looks pretty neat too. Brushed metal wallpaper, lots of neutral grey tones. The crayon colours that so many people seem to dislike are available if you want, but not switched on by default. – Frank Shearar Apr 16 '10 at 18:39

Newspeak is built on top of Squeak and has a very different look. You can choose between native windows (like most other IDEs) and morphic windows (like in Squeak/Pharo).

answered Jun 12 '09 at 08:13

Damien Cassou

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Squeak was designed as a tool for creating new, innovative user interfaces, and there are some great examples - take a look at Scratch, for instance. Unfortunately, the same effort has not gone into the Squeak IDE itself. This may be changing, however - take a look at Pharo, a fork of Squeak which improves things like fonts, colours etc. and strips out some of the Squeak deadwood.

answered Jun 04 '09 at 12:37

Squeak 4.0 and onwards looks a lot nicer than it used to. – Frank Shearar Oct 22 '10 at 16:23

One problem is that we're currently in a bit of a licensing mess until we get the MIT/BSD license assigned to all of the existing core. Once we get that in place, we can move forward to a modular system, and updating the UI is clearly part of the outcome of that.

answered Jun 06 '09 at 00:51

Randal Schwartz

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Update: Pharo is now license-clean – Stephan Eggermont Jul 02 '09 at 14:16
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Unfortunately, Pharo's "clean license" is not certified by anyone with muscle, so it's sorta moot. EToys has VPRI behind it, and Squeak Core will have SFC behind it. – Randal Schwartz Jul 02 '09 at 21:43
Randal, what do you mean "doesn't have anyone with muscle behind it?" And what are VPRI and SFC? – nes1983 Nov 30 '09 at 16:42
I think he means "lawyers". VPRI: Viewpoints Research Institute (Alan Kay's new home), and SFC is the Software Freedom Conservancy. – Frank Shearar Jan 22 '10 at 08:20

The Polymorph package can fix up Squeak UI to look much better.

Kudos to Simon Kirk and the team at Pinesoft for this!

You can find it here: http://www.squeaksource.com/@eCflHJVA_R3o9HjK/wFyW_CgF

Apparently Pharo has it built in.

answered Nov 08 '09 at 23:16

Dafydd Rees

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Use GNU Smalltalk, "The Smalltalk for those who can type™" or Squeak in headless mode. And then if you still want a GUI (just not the all-encompassing traditional Smalltalk GUI), just write your own (perhaps a plug-in to an existing IDE).

answered Jun 04 '09 at 07:00

Matthew Flaschen

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I was interested in GNU Smalltalk for a long time before I noticed Squeak - but never could wrap my mind around how Smalltalk could exist without the environment. As far as headless-mode, these days I run (use) Squeak to run Pier mostly. I'm still interested in learning Smalltalk the way it was meant to be - but my "usage pattern" suggests that learning GNU Smalltalk (gst) would still be worthwhile. – Mei Jun 04 '09 at 14:41