This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: Why Pollock is the future Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants

Yesterday, I had a request come through the Smalltalk IRC channel - why not allow users to eliminate the horizontal scrollbar on the grid view in BottomFeeder? Well, that was a reasonable request - it's now a setting in the latest dev stream build. The way it's implemented illustrates perfectly why the Pollock effort is so important. Take a look at the code that turns the scrollbar off:

| sub ds |
sub := self widgetAt: #feedID.
ds := self
     getComponentFromSubcanvas: sub
     withID: #Dataset1.
ds component container component component components first container useHorizontalScrollBar.

Yes, it's that ugly. The issue is the way the VW GUI adds "decorations" like scrollbars - they are added in via wrappers. It's not simple to navigate down to the correct layer of wrappers - I figured out how to get there via an inspector on the running application. Now, once you get there, there's a nice simple API to turn scrollbars on/off - and yes, I suppose one could surface that via a higher level APi that hid all this nuttiness (but that's non-trivial - wrappers get added based on a lot of variables). This is why Pollock is the future - no one should have to do this to toggle scrollbars :) Thanks to Travis for pointing me in the right direction when I was taking a look at this last night....