[self-interest] Re: outliners

[Jecel Assumpcao Jr]

Jerry Bell wrote:
> I was thinking along the same lines... drop special formatting morphs on
> (default) fields of an auto-generated morph.  It gives the desired editing
> behavior, and behind the scenes this is recorded in annotations on the
> slot, so that next time an editing morph is generated the desired behavior
> is still there.  I haven't dug deeply enough yet - can you annotate an
> object with arbitrary objects, or is it less general?

In theory, you should be able to use arbitrary objects, but I
would be surprised if there aren't at least some placed where
strings are expected. Still, these strings are very flexible
(very much like mail headers) and you might get by with them.

> You can then extend this to other useful things - validation rules(this
> value must be > 5 and < 25), triggers (do this when this value changes)
> etc, all of which work uniformly - you just drop stuff onto slots.

In Squeak, there was an effort in this direction (making things
happen by dropping objects on one another) called MophicWrappers
(I can't find a page for it, but it is available at the MathMorphs
page - http://mate.dm.uba.ar/~caniglia/mathMorphs.html).

And in the Alternate Reality Kit (the father of Self) you would
drop buttons on objects to add funcionality to them.

> There are things you will want to hide from users, and even from other
> objects.  Self does not enforce any privacy, right?  So maybe one day it
> would be nice to have a general permissions/security system in Self.

Self 1.0 to 2.0 had privacy declations for slots, but these didn't
work out very well. The "Us" language (sorry, I don't have any
details) had a way to allow multiple viewpoints on the same object,
which would probably do what you want.

> I'm going to play around for a few weeks and see if I can do anything
> interesting.  It should be a good way to learn the system - I can see
> myself getting my first taste of mirrors very very soon...

And I need to do an accounting program as soon as possible. I will
try to adapt an outliner to do this (so you can have nested accounts
and only have to look at the ones you are interested in). I'll let
you know how it turns out.

-- Jecel