No Spec is a helper API to help you make GUIs quickly, its not a Morphic replacement. Bloc is the Morphic replacement and it has something similar to Spec called Brick.
The GUI situation in pharo is not good, Pharo forked Morphic from Squeak, a well designed API that its design was not followed as it extended and it turned ugly in the process and none actually bother documenting it other than small fragments here and there. Bloc tries to clean up that design at least the Bloc I tried a year ago, I hear now that a lot of thing have changed. Personally I make my own GUI API that fits my needs, I take what Morphic offers and I provide a design that is far closer to the way I think. Unfortunately right now GUI is in a state of flux in Pharo but that is actually a good thing since it definitely needs improvement. Morphic is very useful to learn because right now is the only GUI API that works well for Pharo. Bloc is not ready for public consumption and Spec was never meant for heavily customisable and customised GUIs. Having to read Morphic code to understand it is definetly painful. For example for my customised ChronosManager I decided to provide Taskbar functionality. So I try to copy the taskbar functionality that is implemented in SystemWindow and adjusted to my needs, it was a nightmare. I manage to freeze my image several time and it took a ton of trial and error to figure out how it worked and it still does not behave exactly as I wanted. I am still considering to move my entire GUI to Html/JS/CSS , its ugly and fragmented to work with these technologies but at least they are well documented and very powerful. This is a reason why I designed a way to use Python libraries from Pharo. Python libraries are beautifully designed, well documented and very mature. So you have plenty of options and there is no reason to limit yourself on a pure pharo solution. Modern applications are written in multiple languages and frameworks. You just use the right tool for the job. On Thu, Jun 30, 2016 at 2:57 PM Tommaso Dal Sasso < tommaso.dalsa...@gmail.com> wrote: > I was not complaining about Spec, just reporting my experience with the > various UI toolkits in Pharo as a relatively newbie to this area of Pharo. > > Anyway, as I wrote in my first email, I had difficulties with Spec to go > beyond building a standard interface, especially in performing text > manipulation (font size) or coloring the background of a string, or > encapsulating pieces of text in frames. I tried to understand how to do > that, but there is very little documentation on the matter, and the main > answer I got was "be prepared to use Morphic". > > Trying to understand how to access the properties of the elements I found > several comments like: > > [talking about font size in Spec] > On 03/10/15 09:24, stepharo wrote: > > I think that this part has been completely forgotten by spec. > > Normally the layout should take into account the size of the label and > font > > and I do not see why we could not specify the color and other attributes > we want to have but we did not work on this point. > > Now we will have to see that in the context of Brick skin. > > > > Stef > > Don't get me wrong, I like Spec, it is just unclear to me if it wants to > be the default toolkit to build widgets in Pharo (in this case it should > probably access more properties of Morphic), or if wants to be completely > engine-agnostic, therefore preferring abstraction over expressiveness. > > > > Tommaso > > > > On 26/06/16 23:39, Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas wrote: > > +1 :) > > Offray > > On 26/06/16 02:56, stepharo wrote: > > + 1 > > Stef > > Tommaso, > > can you give some concrete examples of what it is that you wanted to do to > refine your application and that was really hard (or impossible) to do with > Spec? > > As long as we do not know what is wrong, we cannot fix it. > > As long as we do not know what important things are wrong, we cannot > prioritize. > > -- > Does this mail seem too brief? Sorry for that, I don’t mean to be rude! > Please see http://emailcharter.org . > > Johan Fabry - http://pleiad.cl/~jfabry > PLEIAD and RyCh labs - Computer Science Department (DCC) - University > of Chile > > On Jun 25, 2016, at 15:54, Tommaso Dal Sasso <tommaso.dalsa...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > The beauty that I am looking for as a developer for has to do with the > code and the API. I consider important how fast I am able to prototype a > working example --in this Spec is excellent-- and how much I can extend the > code to refine my application --in this Spec is really hard to use--. > > > > > >
