Re: Bad Aspects of Morphic?

One current problem involves the ScrollPane [ScrollPane+TwoWayScrollPane]:
The entire contents of scrollpanes are drawn all the time, even when most of
them are not visible.  A heavy user of ScrollPanes can get burned bad on
this. Lex Spoon has a patch that fixes this is the special case of
PluggableLists, but it is still a problem for others. I made the suggestion
that perhaps Layouts can be used to help determine visibility and avoid
excessive drawing of invisible morphs; maybe there are other approaches to
this too [cache the order, like a bsp maybe?].

So far, I can't say that there is anything slow about the Morphic framework
itself; all the slowness I have seen so far is the fault of individual
morphs that are especially bad about occluded drawing (like PluggableLists,
above, and the multiple selection lists, which I posted a fix for earlier).
Ironically, Morphic's speed has let things like this accumulate without
anyone noticing much (for a while).

Eddie

----- Original Message -----
From: "Aaron J Reichow" <reic0024@xxxxxxxxx>
To: "squeak list" <squeak-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, September 27, 2002 10:30 AM
Subject: Bad Aspects of Morphic?


> Hello!
>
> Anyone with experience programming more average or normal GUI toolkits
> knows that Morphic is different.  I think that most people, if they learn
> how to use it, find Morphic better in many ways.  At least I do.  I find
> myself wanting to change my environment, be it Mac OS X, Linux or Win98
> (only at work, and not for long! :), but then I realize that
> Cocoa/GTK+/Win98 are a PIA compared to Morphic for a lot of things.
>
> But surely, Morphic has to have issues.  Speed is the biggest one I've
> heard and observed myself.  What else is wrong with Morphic and how can we
> fix it?  I'd say we have one of the coolest UI toolkits around, but it can
>
> 1. Speed
>    * Solution: ?
> 2. No a consistent and comprehensive 'regular' set of widgets for Morphic.
>    * Solution: Commuinity could decide on Prefab, BobsUI or something
> new- but a partial consensus would be good, so newbies (or oldies)
> know where to put work when they want a new widget part of this
> consistent set
> 3. I'm told events in Morphic suck?
>
> Regards,
> Aaron
>
>   Aaron Reichow  ::  UMD ACM Pres  ::  http://www.d.umn.edu/~reic0024/
> "the profit system follows the path of least resistance and following the
path
>     of least resistance is what makes a river crooked."   ::  u. utah
phillips
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