4:00 - Vassili Bykov on Pollock, APIs, and the toolset. His usability example is last year's Sony Dream Machine (which was in the rooms at last year's StS). Apparently, this thing is a usability nightmare requiring multiple button pushes to make things happen (in utterly inexplicable ways). He points out that the "API" to this device is awful :) Here's Vassili:

Here's a programming example:

specifiesPixelSize
	"Answer whether the font cares about its size"
 
	^pixelSize notNil 
 
pixelSize
	"Answer the receiver's pixel size"
 
	^pixelSize == nil
		ifTrue: [12]
		ifFalse: [pixelSize] 
 

That's a thing of beauty :) Vassili: "Everything I needed to know about framework design I learned when I was 5". He gives an example of stacking blocks. "Simplicity takes work. Complexity happens". So what's cool about Pollock? Intelligently stupid widgets (as opposed to Stupidly intelligent :) ) So - on to demos. My camera phone won't really capture these, so no pics...

One of the big improvements coming is in layout of widgets - either with respect to the pane they are in, or with respect to each other. You can do some of this in Wrapper now (see this post), but Pollock and its tools are going to be a step up, making it possible to specify various layout options in a more obvious fashion.

Now he's talking about tooltips - doing these for Wrapper was real work, involving a 4 state finite state machine. There are 4 states - cool (start), armed (0.5s delay), reaper (tear down), and warm. The warm state pops a tooltip with no delay (i.e., after you get one, just move the mouse along a toolbar to see that). In the current implementation, there is one state machine for the entire system. The Pollock state machine is the same, but with a much cleaner API.

The entry assistant (auto-completion in text entry fields) is simpler as well. The Wrapper implementation requires an additional process (with the synchronization problems that entails) - in Pollock, it's all part of the keyboard handling process, so it "just works" (and is pluggable). He's also demonstrating Intellisense type help, which will appear in the Pollock tools. So much for the claim that "you need static typing" for that :)

Ahh - now he's talking about Splash - the planned GUI builder for Pollock. There's now an extra piece he's calling "Scallops" (fix a bug in Pollock and we'll explain that, he says) - it's the common bits that go between the Pollock framework and the Splash builder that would have use beyond the builder (specs, etc). One of the reasons for seperating this out is to more easily allow for programmatic (i.e., non-spec driven) GUI creation. Pollock will support both modes. The nice thing is, the tools will support moving back and forth - you can generate code from the spec, or an XML spec from the UI Spec - [ed] - I can imagine some Software With Style value adds there :)