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.

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.

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/

LiberLab and Squeak

Looks like this project is using Squeak and EToys:

Swing Bugs

Yet another stupid Java bug in the Swing UI library. But the best is that one has to wait until Java 7 to get it fixed, no backport to version 6.

In Smalltalk fixing bugs in old versions has never been a problem: anything is open and changeable. If the vendor doesn fix it you are able to modify the code yourself. This is what makes customers and developers happy ...

Swazoo for Squeak

Janko Mivšek announced the Swazoo web server 2.0 beta release for Squeak.

Swazoo (Smalltalk Web Application Zoo) is an open source, vendor agnostic, dialect neutral Smalltalk HTTP server with resource and web request resolution framework, a fruit of a first Camp Smalltalk 2000 in San Diego.

Smalltalk Game Engine

Looks like there is a new game engine for 2D games written completely in Smalltalk. See

      http://www.unstdio.com/



Jeffrey Massung (author of unstdio) talks about this project in his blog.

Swim across the Atlantic Ocean

Ever tried to find an easy way from New York to Paris?
Then try these steps from Huw Collingbourne in Google Maps.

VASmalltalk Forum photos

The Instantiations site now points to photos from the VASmalltalk Forum in Frankfurt

Seaside Marketing

After Giles Bowkett posts about Seaside's "Marketing Problem" there is a nice reaction from Kurt Schrader.

I totally agree with Kurt. Seaside rocks compared to other web technologies.
I can show it to other people, they are all fascinated but go back and use file editors and other primitive tools and frameworks. They restart the web server after each major refactoring and read many books and specs about predefined behavior and XML configurations. Sometimes I'm amongst them to make a living ;)

But I dont care. I know and use Smalltalk since many years - it still is my secret weapon. I'm always a step ahead and much more productive with it.

Here is an example: I once created an applications using Seaside and finished it within a month. It took an external team (3 people) nearly one year to recreate it using Java technology for the same functionality.

The reason is simple: in Smalltalk I can keep the focus on the problem. Especially web development with Java is bloated with very specialized frameworks these days. If you ever worked with JSP/JSF/Struts/CF/EJB/... you know what I'm talking about.

Only a few people looking for Rails and other dynamic alternatives ...

Magritte/Seaside based model editor

Pavel announced a small flash demo of the Magritte based model editor (based on the seaside web framework) with direct code generation.

See

http://comtalk.net/public/tmp/shorebase1.htm

Smalltalk Books again

Have a look at Google Books:

http://books.google.de/books?q=Smalltalk

Smalltalk-ish at Microsoft

Jon Udell talks with Alan Wirfs-Brock (who is now at Microsoft) about Smalltalk and dynamic languages. Really interesting talk ...

Scratch on BBC

There is an article (including a video) about Scratch on the BBC news site. Scratch is developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten group using Squeak Smalltalk.



The weekly squeak also reports that Scratch unleashed new projects website

Interviewing Avi on Seaside

Found another interview with Avi about Seaside and his presentation from ETECH 2007. You should also read this writeup if you are interested in the topic.

Machu Picchu in Croquet

The arts metaverse web site includes a video about "Machu Picchu in Croquet". See

http://artsmetaverse.arts.ubc.ca

Croquet is based on Squeak Smalltalk.

Arts Metaverse

Tim Wang is currently working with the Croquet Consortium (Julian Lombardi, David Smith and Mark McCahill) on a project called Arts Metaverse, which in short is to use high quality 3D models inside of Croquet to teach arts related topics (Art History, Archeology, Classical Studies etc...).

He has an e-learning related blog at: http://blog.loaz.com/timwang with some nice videos about the things they do with OpenCroquet.

Software Architecture Group Games for OLPC

Looks like Robert's Software Architecture Group developed small projects running in the Squeak/Etoys image for the One Laptop per Child initiative:

GLASS - Gemstone, Linux, Apache, Seaside and Smalltalk

From Ians blog: After LAMP/WAMP stacks for web development we now have GLASS for the Smalltalk community:

G - Gemstone/S Object Server
L - Linux
A - Apache
S - Seaside
S - Smalltalk

http://seaside.gemstone.com