After lunch, I attended Vassili Bykov's "Interfaces without Tools" presentation. This is a presentation of some of the UI aspects Vassili has been exploring while at Cadence, building tools for Newspeak. Up front... it was really really really cool. If you've not read Vassili's paper on UI composition, you really should. It's a well done piece of work, both in describing where we are today with UIs, as well as some of the solutions he's worked on to close the gap.

Vassili's work underscores (imo) a long held observation about Smalltalk programs. It's been noted in the rise of the WebApp, that while under the hood Smalltalk programs are often technically really cool, their UIs don't look good. Web app or desktop app. What's cool about Vassili's work, is that it looks nice, so you don't have to extrapolate why some of these ideas are good. A random and trivial thing I learned while watching the presentation, in just a minute.

One of the key points of the presentation was that historically, people create "tools" which are statically defined and map to a window construct. And then you have to navigate these tools. And that they quickly become modal. Vassili's approach instead has been to build "interactive documents", and then have the one tool he uses simply be a document viewer/navigator. It's web browser like, but only in superficial ways.

He demoed the creation of a file browser/navigator, and used that process to demonstrate some of the tool aspects. Things like no modality, you can be editing multiple methods at the same time. Nifty custom widgets that make this work (instead of the stock set of buttons and lists). Ability to go back in history and not lose edits. Very cool stuff. He also did a demo, where he remove:'d the window from the Squeak environment and add:'d it to the Windows desktop, and suddenly it showed up as a Windows window, with windows widgets.

And now that random realization. I like gradients. It's one of the things I see as just as essential to get added to the VisualWorks environment as alpha blended icons. A light bulb went off for me regarding gradients while I watched this. From a graphics design point of view, what makes gradients appealing is that they can appear to be one color, but through subtle shading, also define the border of the region, without having to put lines, or beveled boxes around rectangles. Vassili's UI used gradients in a number of places to do this, and it worked very nicely.