Squeak-dev August 2001

squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org

187 participants
488 discussions

Syntax coloring
by Timothy Reaves 04 Aug '01

04 Aug '01

Does anyone know if the existing package to do this is available for the 3.x images? I can only find it for th older ones.

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[ENH] Better Debugging (third round)
by Hans-Martin Mosner 04 Aug '01

04 Aug '01

Some more debugger fixes: 1. Support for stepping into blocks (thanks to Henrik Gedenryd) 2. A NonBooleanReceiver exception 3. Balloon help for the debugger buttons 4. A problem with handling exceptions in the debugger was fixed (when you stepped into the exception handling code, and then did a step which executed the #signal method, it would open a separate notifier) Cheers, Hans-Martin

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Re: non-programmer intro (topic drift)
by Ken Kahn 04 Aug '01

04 Aug '01

Roger Kenyon wrote: > So how does one create a first-person approach applicable to learning > Squeak? The folks at StageCast have a tutorial for Creator that > combines traditional "introduction to the elements" with a guided, > hand-on approach. That's closer, but not yet there. And Jecel Assumpcao Jr replied: >In my "book vs interactive adventure game tutorial" problem, I would >say that it is harder to do a hands-on course with a book. When faced with the same problem for ToonTalk (www.toontalk.com ) I turned to video games for inspiration. Games often present a rich complex world and only a minority of players are willing to read anything to learn how to play. Interactive game tutorials such as those for Incredible Machines and Lemmings inspired me. A puzzle sequence can be designed to introduce new elements and techniques and be fun at the same time. While I have lots of respect for StageCast Creator and I know that its interactive tutorial has been successful, I would not try to emulate it. There is no fun in it - no challenge. You just do what you are told. While interactive game tutorials are my favorite, there are other alternatives that work better with some learners. Remember that people have different learning styles and one learning tool can't fit all. I wrote about this in a chapter in the book The Design of Children's Technology, edited by Alison Druin, published by Morgan Kaufmann, 1998. An abstract of my chapter follows. Maybe enough time has passed and I can get permission to put the whole chapter on my web site. I just sent email asking for permission. Best, -ken kahn Helping Children to Learn Hard Things: Computer Programming with Familiar Objects and Actions Some children, when introduced to something new and complex, will jump in and explore because they enjoy exploration and are good at it. Others are much more timid and will explore only if coached or guided. Others ask for instructions and follow them meticulously. Some children will carefully watch a demonstration, while others are impatient to try things themselves. It is possible that there is a style of learning that dominates others in effectiveness and appeal. The position taken here, however, is that children differ, and that all these learning styles have their place. Even an individual child may switch styles as circumstances and experiences change. Given the wide variety of ways that children learn, how should we design software for children? This chapter attempts to answer this question by looking closely at our experiences with the design and testing of ToonTalk. ToonTalk (Kahn 1996, 1998) is an animated world where children build and run programs by performing actions upon concrete objects. The child builds real computer programs by doing things like giving messages to birds, training robots to work on boxes, loading up trucks, and using animated tools to copy, remove, and stretch items. ToonTalk has been tested with 4th grade classes for the last 3 years. Initially, it supported only an exploratory learning style. Some children quickly began exploring and tried to figure out what each item does and how to combine them. Most, however, asked for guidance. This led to the development of enhancements of ToonTalk that cater to children with different learning styles. ToonTalk now includes a puzzle game that plays the role of a tutorial. This appeals most strongly to children who tend to like to solve problems but are less comfortable exploring on their own. An animated character named Marty was added to ToonTalk that acts like a coach or guide in ToonTalk. Some children like to hear suggestions from him and follow them. Others quickly send Marty away because they find him annoying. A set of narrated demos of ToonTalk was created for those who like to sit and passively be shown how to make things. Illustrated instructions on how to build some programs were produced. These too appeal to a subset of the children. Children of different ages, experiences, and learning styles approach the same software in very different ways. The main lesson we can take away from this experience is that children differ in the degree to which they are motivated and effective at exploring (on their own or with an animated guide), or following instructions, or solving a puzzle sequence. Even the same child will prefer different styles of interaction depending upon her prior experience with the software. Ideally, a software program should be designed so that a wide variety of children might enjoy and benefit from it.

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[BUG] SystemBrowser in 3.1alpha
by Timothy Reaves 04 Aug '01

04 Aug '01

I do not have a fix for this; I'm new to Squeak and its ways of doing things, and hope to contribute more in the future. In the Squeak main window (no project open), I open a System Browser. No Class catagory is selected. I click in the Class pane, and nothing. Fine. I click in the method catagory pane, and get MessageNotUnderstood: definitionST80: . I dismiss that, and click in the method pane, and get MessageNotUnderstood: sourceCodeTemplate It does not matter what order the two panes are clicked in.

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IRC channel?
by Timothy Reaves 04 Aug '01

04 Aug '01

Is there a server/channel for Squeak users?

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And modem shall talk unto telephone......
by John Hinsley 04 Aug '01

04 Aug '01

I'm trying to get my modem to talk to the telephone (more precisely, to dial a phone number). I'm guessing I need to use primitiveSerialPortOpen: to open the port. Then I can chuck some Hayes commands (or Diamond's version of Hayes commands) at it. Now primitiveSerialOpen: wants the following ---- primitiveSerialPortOpen: portNum baudRate: baudRate stopBitsType: stopBitsType parityType: parityType dataBits: dataBits inFlowControlType: inFlowControl outFlowControlType: outFlowControl xOnByte: xOnChar xOffByte: xOffChar I can get some of this from setserial: setserial -a /dev/cua2 /dev/cua2, Line 2, UART: 16550A, Port: 0x03e8, IRQ: 5 Baud_base: 115200, close_delay: 50, divisor: 0 closing_wait: 3000, closing_wait2: infinte Flags: spd_normal skip_test So I guess we'd have primitiveSerialPortOpen: /dev/cua2 "maybe ttyS2" 115200: But the rest is all gobbledegook. And, come to think of it, I don't usually do all that when I use the modem. Am I right in thinking that I can simply issue commands directly to SerialPort? Cheers John -- ****************************************************************************** Marx: "Why do Anarchists only drink herbal tea?" Proudhon: "Because all proper tea is theft." ******************************************************************************

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Opera plugin for linux
by Timothy Reaves 04 Aug '01

04 Aug '01

Is this available? If so, could someone point me in the correct dirrection? Thanks!

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Solved? How to code for start of drag
by Ross Boylan 03 Aug '01

03 Aug '01

How do I get the code that does the first part of drag and drop to kick in? Here's a tentative answer; I welcome corrections. I have two morphs. I want to click on the inner morph and, if I keep the mouse down, drag it out. I seem to be having problems getting the click-drag hooked into the start of the drag code. After experimenting, it seems the key is to capture the mouseDown event (via #handlesMouseDown:) and then mouseDown: evt ^self grabMorph: evt Should I be using grabTransform in here? Is this the right idea? (I was inspired by browsing senders of #grabMorph:). My outer morph (Morph subclass: MorphA) is initialized with initialize |b| super initialize. self color: self defaultColor. self extent: 100@100; enableDragNDrop. b _ MorphB new. b center: self center; extent: self extent / 3.0. self addMorphFront: b. On the one hand, I thought that drag and drop was supposed to work pretty automatically. On the other, I don't see how it could: if I click on a morph I may want to popup a menu, perform some action, or drag it, and it seems that needs to be in the code. If I get past this to a real world example, I'll also have several levels of nesting. For example if D is in C in B in A, and I want to be able to drag D out (really a copy of it), which of A, B, and C need changes to support it? I was going to research this on my own, when I discovered I couldn't even handle the B in A case :(. P.S. As others have noted David Smith's stuff on the swiki doesn't conform to current protocols. I'm running 3.1 alpha #4173.

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RE: [OT] Interactive Fiction is an Oxymoron
by G.J.Tielemans＠dinkel.utwente.nl 03 Aug '01

03 Aug '01

>Ger: Who is here talking about interactive story-telling? ..The first meaning of fiction in my old Oxford (1980 $5.95)is: fiction= a product of imagination. (I place a good simulation or a good TextAdventure under this definition and even prefer a combination of these; like independent Characters moving in a story-maze.) ..The second meaning: fiction= an invented story. Even inside this second meaning you could wonder when a story is created: - When someone invents the scheme of the story? - When a good storyteller tunes this story to his estimation of his public? - Or when you - as listener with your own background - "read" between the story-lines? Interactiv Fiction is the dream that you could bring this even a step closer to the receiver... -----Original Message----- From: Andrew C. Greenberg [mailto:werdna@mucow.com] Sent: maandag 30 juli 2001 17:40 To: squeak-dev(a)lists.squeakfoundation.org Subject: [OT] Interactive Fiction is an Oxymoron Sorry, but the recent thread used a term that just makes me boil over. It is, in my view, the quest for "interactive fiction" that has held back gaming now for decades. The reason for this is simple. Interaction is an anathema to excellent storytelling. A storyteller, at least per the Poetics, is concerned above all things, with timing. The tempo of a story is everything. The manner and velocity with which the characters are introduced and developed is essential to obtaining the necessary suspension of disbelief -- the tempo of building conflicts ultimately yielding a climax or climaxes drives the reader to continue, and the effectiveness of the denoument to finish, explain and justify the story are all measured along a timescale -- and the tempo between these elements is essential. >Ger: designing the tempo of a video on a stroyboard is very very difficult for our students, A threaded storyline (Oops.. with LOOPS??) should be suddenly easy because the tool can do it easily?. > Ger: yes and no.. The RIGHT Tempo is everything (most games have boring difficult=long puzzles on to many places... it invites children to cheat. As designer you can anticipate on that. My Youngest daughter cheats in ThemeHospital and then the speaker-system of the hospital shouts it loud over the corridors... She really hates it every time she does cheat, but not enough to turn off the sound...) > Ger: You can also create the feeling that the player thinks he is so close to the solution that it would be a pitty to stop after all his efforts, hours later he still thinks the same. Or the puzzle should look misleading simple: like that simple looking rubic-cube puzzle: give it three turns from the correct position and then ask someone to solve it: he knows that you gave it only three turns... It is the nature of a simulation, or interactive game, to permit the user control over his environment. Should he enjoy prowling around an arena for hours, so be it. If he wants to wander aimlessly through a jungle or search the interstices of irrelevant subject matter to the game -- again, so be it. The more detail, the more interesting the scenario -- but the far less effective the story. As an extreme example, while a simulation can sustain dead ends to make a game work, no story can survive that. >Ger: What about a good detective-story from Agatha Christie. Every time she makes you think that the wrong person did it, until he dies also (MY favroite as child: Ten little ...) On the other hand, if you have no dead ends at all, players feel a grave loss of challenge. (Enter the love-hate relationship between gamers, game designers and their game "cheats," walkthoughs and "cheat books.") This inherent conflict, the war between storytelling and interaction is, to me, the locus where all games (including my own efforts in this regard) have failed. >Ger: I think that you can broaden here your criticism to lots of Hypertext-dreams that did not work.. Of course, some merging of interaction and storytelling is possible without one destroying the other, but the more of one formulation is added, the more the other suffers. The trick, of course, is to recognize that interactive fiction is an oxymoron. To design the game well, first realistically design it as either a simulation-with-a-bit-o-story, or a story-with-a-bit-o-simulation. Then use smoke-and-mirrors, plain old theatre tricks plus new tech tricks, to make the game SEEM more storytelling, or more interactive, than it really is. >Ger: You have more hints to create better IF? >Ger: when desktop-tools came up everyone thought he could do quality printing on the fly, isn't this the same with these tools? Don't we underestimate the creative work of heavy teams working at the creation of a new game: Didn't even Disney to easily think that they could compete with the real game-industry while they where good in movies, cartoons and theme-parks and heaving some of the best fiction-realizers in house? Why do game-companies rise and fall? (like Infocom, to stay with the subject.)

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[Bug] Windows plugin in multiuser environment
by Russell Allen 03 Aug '01

03 Aug '01

Hi all, We attempted to load the Squeak browser plugin onto a computer lab of Windows NT machines; however there is a problem. If the plugin is run as a different user to the user who installed the plugin, it won't load the squeaklet - it will just run the image. If you run the same plugin as the user who installed it, it will download and run the squeaklet as expected. I don't know much about how WinNT handles user permissions; so I am stumped as to what this bug is or how to fix it. Can anyone help? I would like to be able to use the plugin as part of a course on legal technology... :) Russell ---------------------------------------- Russell Allen russell.allen(a)firebirdmedia.com ----------------------------------------

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