Monday, July 30, 2007

Smalltalk YX on Pocket PC

Luca Bruno is currently porting his Smalltalk YX to PocketPC. Here is a screenshot of Syx running on the Pocket PC emulator:


Monday, July 16, 2007

Squeak on Java

In May 2006 I reported about a Squeak image running on Java VM. Looks like Pavel decompiled it and made the source code available. Decompilation of Java is easy - just use tools like JAD.

However - if you want to play with it, here is a pointer to the source code:
http://comtalk.net/public/pub/SqueakOnJava/SqueakOnJava.zip

Thursday, July 12, 2007

Squeak UI improvements

There is a discussion on the Squeak mailinglist about some simple ergonomic adjustments in the look and feel of the standard image. Gary Chambers reported about commercial work done in Squeak and an add-on package ready to release back into the community.

This package provides a nice UI for some standard (business application like) services, choosing colours, selecting a font etc.
It also provides a framework for creating "standard" morphs (checkboxes, drop-lists etc). His desktop looks like this (click one of the images to see more):

 

A few years back there we had something similar: the Zurgle Project by Jim Benson. It includes a theme for installing a Windows XP style interface:

    

I used Zurgle in my Developer Workspace project (which is now replaced by Damiens squeak-dev image, unfortunately with the standard Squeak look).



I think Squeak requires some more UI improvements and at least support for common widgets found on other platforms to build standard applications.
This would open the project to a broader audience and also allow to experiment with new GUI approaches. I was impressed by the Squeak UI work done back in the Exobox days:

    &nbps;

And I look forward for 3D user interfaces as in Croquet:

  

Sport for Squeak

Bruce posted a message that there is now also a Squeak port of "Sport" available at the sourceforge.net project site (contributed by Janko).

If you want to get the latest version for Squeak you can use the Squeaksource page:

http://www.squeaksource.com/SPort.html

Sport is a Smalltalk portability layer. Sport presents a consistent interface and implemented in a number of Smalltalk dialects. Smalltalk code written to the Sport interfaces can be run in any Smalltalk dialect without alteration.

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

New Seaside homepage

Philippe Marschall announced the new Seaside homepage.

The page itself runs on Seaside (2.8) and the Pier CMS and is hosted at
Seaside-Hosting.

Monday, July 02, 2007

Syx 0.1

Luca Bruno is currently implementing yet another Smalltalk version.
He just released the first version 0.1 of Smalltalk YX (Project Syx). It's running on Windows and Linux, is written in C with a simple garbage collector.

You can download the executable as well as the source from http://code.google.com/p/syx/