Morphic - The Squeak User Interface

by Juan Manuel Vuletich

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Classic Morphic Programming

Named and shortly described by Squeak Central (then "The Squeak Team") in "Programming in Morphic".

"This is the kind of programming for which Morphic was originally designed, and excellent examples of clean and attractive style using that approach can be found, for example, in BookPageSorterMorph and EnvelopeEditorMorph.

In "Classic Morphic Programming" style, you define your own subclasses of one or more generic Morph classes, and blend them into a working subsystem. Here, you're directly extending Morphic, in grand and time-honored Smalltalk manner. The fundamental tool here is the Browser: you locate and familiarize yourself with particular Morphic classes, and you then subclass the ones that you decide are appropriate for your application.

Most current Squeak users will prefer this traditional, mature, analytic, browser-based Smalltalk approach."

This is traditional Smalltalk programming, creating and modifying classes in a Smalltalk browser. The examples given in the introduction fall into this style. At this moment, it is the most effective way to develop applications. By applications I mean morphs that can be reused and maintained, useful for building end-user programs. It is also the most familiar way to a Smalltalk programmer. A basic tutorial by John Maloney is "Tutorial: Fun with the Morphic Graphics System". I will write one based on my Scrabble Game. You can download and study it, but the complete tutorial is not written yet.