Comment on: "Morphic 3: The Future of GUIs" When Morphic was…

Comment on: "Morphic 3: The Future of GUIs"
When Morphic was introduced to Squeak ten years ago, it changed the way smalltalkers
thought about GUIs. The feelings were mixed as Morphic was inspirational and
intriguing at once.
Over the years, many fruitful experiments were implemented on Squeak and all of them
took advantage of the possibilities enabled by Morphic. However, Morphic was not the
only innovation brought by Squeak and thus the diversity of contributions created a rather
chaotic growth in many different directions. As a result Morphic became too complex
and hard to understand and maintain. Everybody realized that a major refactoring was
required. However the effort needed to accomplish such undertaking was so big that most
squeakers willing to address it felt intimidated by the enterprise.
Morphic 3.0 by Juan Vuletich is the project that turned dismay into hope. Rooted in a
deep understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the current state of Morphic,
Vuletich re-envisioned the brilliant future that Squeak always deserved. Morphic 3.0 is
much more than a refactoring. It is a complete re-engineering of concepts, strategies and
implementations. It brings simplicity to the design along with an incredibly powerful
graphic framework that provides new capabilities not found in other environments.
LC