Re: Self UI

[R James Noble <kjx@comp.vuw.ac.nz>]

There are several interesting issues (to me, at least) that this
discussion concerning the prototype UI has raised. Jecel has raised
several points, most of which Bay replied to - and this is my $0.02.

It seems to me that editing and cloning objects should be easy to add,
and unless someone comes up with a good graphical syntax for self code
(put blocks explicitly into separate objects :-), textual editing for
that seems the way to go.

Different views of objects are more tricky. The problem is that an
abstract view of a given object can be a view of that object and it's
component objects - that is, more than one low-level object. This
probably destroys the "integrity of object identity". The same problem
may occour with simultaneous different views of the same object -
however this may be more amenable to a "user interface design"
solution such as using multiple panes in a single window for a single
object, and then seperate windows for seperate objects.

The final item is the possibility of sending messages to objects -
that is, maintaining a good display of these multiple windows on
multiple objects as the world they are displaying changes about their
ears (without, of course, degrading the performance of the system).
This is possible, but I don't think it's just a part of a language
browser yet.

James