Hi,
While giving a try to Pharo5, I wrote some notes about how it fells.
It may be useful to share it. Of course it is also very opinionated and
may be rude. But no offense to consider, really.
More time is need for a real developer experience, may be later.
Hilaire
--
Dr. Geo
http://drgeo.eu
Random feeling when discovering Pharo5
It is described in term of interrogation from someone using Pharo since years,
so imagine one just discovering Pharo.
Too Many rubrics in the settings browser come without description! It is not
acceptable. It is ok for obvious settings as a "Text colour" settings but not
for non obvious or ambiguous ones
Font size is ridiculous! Make it at minimum 12 for the permanent visual elements
Font with proper size looks great!
It looks like shortcut get rationalized, it is great.
The default graphic theme is HORRIBLE, there is not enough contrast between the
information and actionable tools, it is a pain for the eyes.
Rubric editor: what is it ?
I changed background to pink I don't find where it does something
Renraku rules: what is it, no description in the settings browser.
What is the description area useful in the settings browser if there is
no information
Line numbers: where is it used, not in the system browser
Ah, you have to click on L in the browser -> what is tooltips good for?
btw, what is "Format as you read" -> what is tooltips good for?
Do we need line numbers? I cannot imagine any use case!
As well do we need lines counts and characters
=> a lot of noise in the UI
ShoreLine report: what is it? Again no description in the settings browser!
Shortcut Reminder: nice ! and it is properly described!
Nautilus History navigator: the looks is nicely put, but IT DOES NOT WORK! Ah
now it works, strange, diesel engine?
AST navigation: what is it? I don't understand its description. What nodes?
BlueInk pretty printing: again settings without description!
The blue Ink inspector window needs improvement: looks unprofessional.
I hope hte neglected state of the blueink settings does not reflect its
internal state!
Nautilis:
where is the local senders tools?
Plugins, somes seem to not work or worst the system hangs after
activating (ie InformationLine, CountingKey, Execution...)
Spotter
Why Ctrl+[->]? my intuition tells me [->] as indicated by the blue icon
arrow, please fix it!
Playground
Why Ctrl+shift+g to open a pane, looks like Ctrl+g is working.
Nevertheless Ctrl+g is not very handy short cut, it hurts the fingers! Can it
be changed?
When do-it-all-and-go, the meta pane does not look nice: there are
sliders but there is enough place
Overall, the tool feels nice, need to get used to it.
Time for serious look up, try loading drgeo into pharo 5.0
-following instruction at Smalltalkhub drgeo page => gettext package freeze
pahro at initializing! Can't break the process with alt+[.]. VM received user
interrupt but no interrupt
- loading manually the packages :(
Then, this error:
nodeType
^#Expecting a literal type -> 'distance_2pts'
So at load/compile time #'distance_2pts' is not accepted as a symbol, but from
the Playground it is ok!
End of the game.
So, with my previous tries I can load DrGeo in Pharo4.0, however it is
was not working properly. Now there are at least issue when loading gettext and
DrGeoII-core packages.
Looks like a superfluous space after the dash breaks loading the code (i.e. it
was working for a decade).
Now DrGeo is loaded, UI looks like shit :( Not the glut to explore further for
now.
Locale does not get initialized correctly (yes activated from the settings
browser:)
Locale current isoLanguage
but
Locale current determineLocaleID "fr-FR"
May be a problem in the startup.
I set a halt in Locale>>startUp:
I can't go over the halt to trace code execution
clicking on Proceed, the debugger hangs
On Pharo3, got post-mortem halt to hang around
Image is now 47.7MB and it does not shrink! Big fat boy :)
