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Alternative UIs
There has lately been lots of discussion (and even, by some brave souls, WORK!) on various aspects of alternative UIs.
First and foremost is of course Morphic, which is still changing somewhat but is becoming relatvely un-alternative.
Also from Squeak Central -
Other (reallly alternative stuff)
- Package: ThingLab (much more than a UI) - allows you to play with constraint based models (like electrical circuits, geometery...) in a prototype based browser.
- mailto:shaping@bigfoot.com (please replace with name) has the definitive Alternative UI rant
- Oberon - a rather different system with "tiled autoresized/autorepositioned usually-nonoverlapping windows", find it here http://www.cs.inf.ethz.ch/oberon/
- ACME for Plan 9 by Rob Pike was inspired by Oberon and mixes the Unix text interface and windows nicely. A reimplementation of ACME for Unix is vailable as Wily.
- A short, interesting paper by JecelAssumpcaoJr.
- Various ideas were raised about providing something analog to X workspaces by allowing even easier access to switching projects, or a Win95-like taskbar. If you use Windows and don't know what Workspaces are, go to goScreen.
- Pad++ is a different direction emphisizing zooming and with lenses acting as concrete filters that change the way something is displayed. Think of moving an InspectionLense over different objects...
- Fisheye techniques - mentioned by Michael Rueger, they mean that some windows/panes automagically grow (and others shrink), allowing you to see more of what interests you.
Context sensitive browsers
- BobArning's browser - is almost all code pane, with menu-buttons instead of list panes, and a drill feature. See here for the current version.
- Whisker is a different sort of browser, which uses Bob's collapsible hierachical list for viewing multiple classes and methods simultaneously. I've just checked out a preliminary version which looks very promising. Look here for it:
http://www.mindspring.com/~dway/smalltalk/whisker.html
- Dynamic context menus were done (though not in Squeak) by "Francisco J Vives"
- The Refactoring Browser has them too, among things.
- MorphicWrappers also known as MathMorphs, let any old object wear a MorphicSpaceSuit and then you can just splat it on the world and tell it to do things. Careful, they sometimes talk back. Class-specific MorphSuits (hey, this could be a good name for MWs...) provide an alternative to browsers.