Morphic is much more than NSView or any other graphics class that simply allow the re-implementation of a limited set of features. Morphic is an extremely malleable UI construction kit. Some design ideas behind Morphic makes this intention clear:
- A comprehensive hierarchy of 2D coordinate systems is included. They are not restricted to Cartesian or linear. Useful nonlinear coordinate systems include polar, logarithmic,hyperbolic and geographic (map like) projections.
- Separation of the handling of coordinate systems from the morphs themselves. A morph should only need to select its preferred coordinate system, instead of needing to convert every point it draws to World coordinates by itself. Its
#drawOn: method and the location of its sub-morphs are expressed in its own coordinate system.
- Complete independency of Display properties such as size or resolution. There is no concept of pixel. The GUI is thought at a higher level. All the GUI is independent of pixel resolution. All the rendering is anti aliased.
- Separating the coordinate system eases the moving, zooming and rotation of morphs.
- All coordinates are Float numbers. This is good for allowing completely arbitrary scales without significant rounding errors.
- The Morph hierarchy is not a hierarchy of shapes. Morphs don't have a concept of a border or color. There is no general concept of submorph aligning. A particular morph may implement these in any way that makes sense for itself.
- Morphic event handling is flexible and allows you to send events to arbitrary objects. That object need not subclass Morph.