FreeType Plus release for Squeak

Andrew Tween announced the FreeType Plus release for Squeak. More infos are available at the swiki.

Sudoku Solver in Seaside

Martin J. Laubach has created a Sudoku Solver in Seaside.
It shows how easy it is to create web applications with the Smalltalk web application framework.

If you want to learn more read his blog.

OmniBrowser docu

Alexandre Bergel announced a new paper on Omnibrowser:

http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~scg/Archive/Papers/Berg07cOmnibrowser.pdf

OmniBrowser is a browser framework started by Colin Putney that supports the definition of browsers based on an explicit metamodel. A first implementation is available for Squeak.

UI patents

Found a nice summary on the history of user interfaces and how Smalltalk has influenced user interfaces we know from modern operating system today.

Looks like Apple is sued by a user interface patent today. The patent was originally filed by Xerox.

What if the first cave man would have patented how to start a fire ...

2D in 3D

Channel 9 (the Microsoft MSDN tech channel) showed a video on interactive 2D controls on WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) surfaces. There is also a new blog on this topic.

Maybe this feature of WPF will soon be highlighted as the best thing since sliced bread - but Squeak Smalltalk had some of these features since years. Maybe you remember the bunny demo where you can easily mix 2D and 3D in Smalltalk.

Have a look at Croquet - there you can easily use 2D morphic projects and mix them with interactive 3D scenes. You can select 2D objects in 3D, interactively change them and even type and select text.
And it's based on Smalltalk - therefore it is platform independent and completely open source ...

The Blue Book as PDF

The so called "blue book" (Smalltalk-80: The Language and its Implementation by Adele Goldberg and DavidRobson) is now available as PDF on the Free Books page.