The Fast and the Spurious

Hello Future Squeakers!
This is the cases page for The Fast and the Spurious. In this page you will find nice gems of advice for programming in Squeak and designing a user interface. For Spring 2003, we had to program Squeaken, a web-enabled financial management software based on Quicken. Our group philosophy was, build it as if you were going to sell it. As you will see, our Squeaken turned out pretty well. We got a lot of kudos for an excellent GUI. But we didn't just settle with being the pretty-boy of the neigborhood. We made sure every functionality worked as designed and planned and more! We got a lot of feedback from testing and we improved the code throughout each milestone. Thanks to Prof. Waters and our TA Lex Spoon for your valuable advice and feedback!

We submitted every milestone as a PR file. This means all your work for that milestone is published to one file instead of multiple fileouts to ST files. Your entire changeset will be "captured" into a project file with a .pr extension. The benefits of doing this is many. First, you won't have 600 million .st files to fileIn. Second, your TA will appreciate only having to loadIn 1 project file. And finally, you have a clean project file to start with for your next milestone.

Download our project here: Squeaken.zip (our project), Squeaken User's Manual, Design Documentation.

Here is a shot of our project after it has been loaded in. It will open a custom background with a tiny Workspace with the command to start Squeaken pre-written (for TA's convenience).

Custom background and pre-loaded Workspace with execute command

Our splash screen Login screen

Gem: Use BobsUIv2 rather than what's available on SqueakMap: BobsUIv3x. After corresponding with Bob Arning himself, the guru behind BobsUI, he said he working on 2.0 and after that, it just took a life of its own. 3.0 is way too complicated to use and a pain for beginners. Once BobsUIv2 is filed in, invoke it by Do-it'ing: UIExample new simpleWindow1. in the Workspace.

Quick pop-up messages

Gem: After a successful login, we display a quick message saying the user was authenticated. This can be done very easily by:
showMessage: 'Text in here'.


How to get stars to display for password text entry fields?

Gem: We used the text set property: TextObject color: Color red; beAllFont: (StrikeFont passwordFontSize: 15).


Centering a SystemWindow in the middle of the screen

Gem: If mainUI is your SystemWindow object then, first set its extent, openInWorld, then reposition it. You cannot position it first, then openInWorld.
mainUI extent: 490 @353.
mainUI openInWorld.
mainUI position: Display center - (mainUI extent//2). "auto-center trick (chris)"


Our contribution to SqueakMap: BarGraph

Bonus: One of the graph reports we had to create would look best in a bar graph. Surprisingly, there was not a bar graph already made by somebody in the Squeak community (pie chart and plot graph exist). So we decided to create one! SqueakMap to BarGraph here


Plugging Toolbar like buttons to your User Interface a la BobsUIv2

Gem: A nifty thing that BobsUIv2 features is the ability to add any morph to your BobsUI. This can be accomplished by accessing the addMorphToUI: method in UIComponentMorph


Publishing your projects

Left-click the World to bring the World menu and choose projects...

Choose create new morphic project Change your project name and click inside the mini window to open your project

Gem: After you have created a blank morphic project, file in all your code including third-party code like BobsUIv2, PlotMorph, BarGraph, and etc. Then open the World menu again and choose save project on file.... This will create .pr file in your Squeak directory with your project name. Be sure to open a clean image and test your project file but dragging and dropping the .pr file into the World.


Who is The Fast and The Spurious?
Chris "Squeak-Hwan" Cho gt5436a cc@cc.gatech.edu
Gallagher Squeakmaster-G Pryor gtg233b
Jay "Major Corporal" Yeo gtg137b
Sid"darth Vader" Shah gt#####


More screenshots

Exit confirmation window Secondary shortcuts toolbar Line graph report

Portfolio content window Login screen Change password window

Link to this Page

• Cases last edited on 30 July 2011 at 2:33 am by r59h132.res.gatech.edu