Squeak-dev April 2010

squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org

122 participants
595 discussions

Etoys developer chat today
by Bert Freudenberg 13 May '10

13 May '10

Please join our weekly Etoys developer chat today. Follow this link to see the time in your local time zone: http://tinyurl.com/3xfx4es To participate, enter your name as nickname on http://chat.squeakland.org/ and press "Login". Then say hi :-) Alternatively, use an IRC client of your choice to join #etoys on irc.freenode.net Everyone is welcome! - Bert -

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"The World of Smalltalk" launch
by Geert Claes 11 May '10

11 May '10

Hi everyone, Following the extremely positive feedback I received grouping all Smalltalk related mailing lists I have extended the initiative with a free informational website for anything Smalltalk under the name "The World of Smalltalk" on www.world.st (nabble forums are on forum.world.st) I decided to keep the website clean and simple and have not added any ads. I only added a gratuitous "donate" link on the "contact" and "about this site" page for those who want to make a voluntary contribution towards the domain registration cost or even for my time and effort :) I have only added the local smalltalk user groups which seemed still active and the events calender includes the upcoming events I was aware of as well as the UK Smalltalk User Group's shared calendar. Please feel free to distribute and/or link to the www.world.st website (which helps with the search engine optimization) to guide anyone to the information they need. Any feedback regarding the site is also welcome! Cheers, Geert -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/The-World-of-Smalltalk-launch-tp2073798p2073798.html Sent from the Squeak - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

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Re: Call For *Your* Opinion
by Ralph Boland 10 May '10

10 May '10

= Survey ====== 1. What are your biggest hurdles preventing you from contributing to Squeak? I am working on some open source projects which are not ready for release. When they are ready I will release them. The only thing I released so far was my FasterSets package. It was pretty much ignored until Levente Uzonyi decided to rewrite it from scratch and had his version contributed to trunk. As a result my contribution to Squeak is still 0. 2. What would it take for you to contribute more? >From my point of view I am contributing. I am just not able to release what I have done yet. Given that my opinions on matters I have posted on have generally differed from just about everybody else it will be interesting to see how my contributions are received once they are released. 3. What are your expectations in regard to contributions? I hope (not necessarily expect) that some subset of the community will take sufficient interest in the contribution to provide valuable feedback and perhaps even get involved in improving the contribution. For the latter I guess Levente Uzonyi did this in the extreme with my FasterSets package. Beware of what you wish for, your wish may be granted. 4. What are the reasons behind the low level of contributions from other community members, according to you? I really don't know. I know some people are contributing a lot. I assume part of the issue is that there just aren't a lot of others. I know Keith Hodges used to contribute a lot to Squeak but has become alienated from this community and so releases little now. I consider this a serious loss for Squeak. 5. What would you improve in order to increase the number of contributions and the number of contributors? I don't really know. Given the small size of the Smalltalk/Squeak communities though I view all the forks with some level of regret. More forks means more innovation I know but my main thought is that I am going to have to port my contributions to each of the forks and that is a pain. Anything that can be done to reduce this pain will help. 6. How would you rate your sense of social identification to the Squeak community, on a scale from 1 to 10. (1 is the lowest, 10 the highest) Around 4. My biggest frustration is making a posting requesting feedback and getting no feedback at all. There is a tendency of readers of my posts to jump on some point in a posting and then ignore the rest of the posting. This can be frustrating at times. I experience these problems with other communities as well. Regards, Ralph Boland -- Volume * Density = Mass. Volume / Density = Intelligence. The latter equation explains the equal intelligence of men and women and the capabilities of some well known operating systems.

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shared object between main.exe and Squeak.dll
by Ang BeePeng 08 May '10

08 May '10

Hi all, I build a Squeak.dll. A main.exe call Squeak.dll, passing in Smalltalk string or selector, Squeak.dll execute it, and return an object pointer to main.exe. main.exe then can use the object, send a message to that object pointer. I tried with SmallInteger, it works fine, since the object body is within the object header. But for normal object, it is meaningless if I kept object pointer at main.exe. GC will definitely recycle it since there's no reference to that object. I need to be able to use the object pointer back in Squeak.dll all the time. Any idea how can this be done? Any advise? Thank you so much in advance. Ang Beepeng -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/shared-object-between-main-exe-and-Squeak-dll-tp20231… Sent from the Squeak - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

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download tutorials from YouTube Re: [squeak-dev] Re: What is the plan for 4.2?
by David Corking 08 May '10

08 May '10

Chris Cunnington wrote: > "Is it possible to download the videos for offline use?" > I don't think from YouTube you can do that. DownloadHelper plugin for Firefox works for me (it is free of charge with readable source AFAICT, though proprietary. The videos are watermarked if you use the plugins built-in converter on Windows. Mac/Linux not so.)) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3006

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Monticello-based updates for Etoys
by Bert Freudenberg 06 May '10

06 May '10

On 26.04.2010, at 04:56, Bert Freudenberg wrote: > > On 19.04.2010, at 13:52, Bert Freudenberg wrote: >> >> Hi folks, >> >> as we discussed lately we want to enable easier contributions, following a model similar to Squeak's "trunk". I spent the weekend making the latest tools from Squeak work in the Etoys image. I did not push it to the update stream yet, but it is attached. Let's discuss in the developer meeting on IRC later today. >> >> Here is how to test it: >> >> * Download Etoys-To-Go4-Final.zip from squeakland.org and unzip and run >> * get halo for world, choose "preferences..." from halo menu >> * disable "eToyFriendly" in the "scripting category" >> * click the gray World background, choose "previous project" from the World menu >> * you'll be taken to the hidden top-level project, light-blue background >> * now is a good time to save the image (not save-as) >> >> This will result in an image ready for development work. I'm suggesting to use Etoys-To-Go because it is self-contained and allows to save the image easily. The regular install is read-only. >> >> Now for my stuff ... > > ... which I just pushed to the new 4.1 update stream at etoys.squeak.org > > * Evaluate this in a workspace to set the new update server (you need at least a 4.0.2336 image): > HTTPSocket httpFileInNewChangeSet: 'etoys.squeak.org/updates/newUpdateStream-bf.cs' > * Then load updates. This will ask if you want to advance to 4.1, say yes. Load updates again > * This will take quite a while ... > * ... but eventually you should have an image with Monticello loaded :) > > Heres a log of the changes: > http://squeakland.org/updates/ > > This includes the recategorization from trunk (huge 1 MB changeset) and an edited version of Karl's recategorization, ending up in a quite reasonable number of packages IMHO. Also, thanks to Eliot for porting the compiler changes! > > The next step should be to create proper packages and commit them to the etoys repo. > - Bert - We did it :) There is an initial version of all Monticello packages that now constitute the Etoys image in our main repository at http://source.squeak.org/etoys.html If you load updates, it will first fetch changesets from the update stream, and then proceed to update packages from the repository. We will mostly just post new packages from now on. But if needed, we still have the update stream. To get an Etoys image for development, either follow the procedure I outlined above (takes about 10 minutes here), or download an all-in-one zip (based on Etoys-To-Go) from here: http://etoys.squeak.org/download/ It's easier if you do not use save-as in this setup, only regular image save. The image name is mentioned explicitly in the VM settings. New versions can be submitted to the "Etoys Inbox" by *anyone*, no registration required: http://source.squeak.org/etoysinbox.html Of course, Etoys developers can commit to the main repository directly. If you want to have access, register on that server, and ping me so I add you to the right group. We'll look at all contributions, though we need to be somewhat conservative. Remember this is used by kids worldwide, it's deployed on about a million machines, and more are to come [1]. Features are cool, but don't make the kids cry, mkay? ;) Btw, if someone feels more comfortable using changesets, don't worry, you can still attach them to a ticket on our tracker at http://tracker.squeakland.org/ Some other developer will then build Monticello packages and commit them. So, the gates are open, let the contributions flow :) - Bert - [1] http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/one-laptop-per-child-and,1271519.sh…

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Re: [squeak-dev] The Inbox: Morphic-phite.429.mcz
by Hannes Hirzel 04 May '10

04 May '10

Hello Philipp I took a fresh 4.1 image, updated it to 10012, and loaded Morphic-phite.429.mcz. As the comments were fine I was quickly able to write an example (code below). Then I had to choose 'Rebuild menus' It worked fine. The question is now (see another thread by Bert) if we should go or your solution (MenuSpec based) or the one by Steve Wessels (Pragma based). I do not feel too comfortable with pragmas yet whereas the MenuSpec is something I easily understand. And in addition I have the gut feeling that pragmas are meant for some more basic things (a kind of compiler directive, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_%28programming%29) Like Bert I would like to see some discussion **on this issue, but not too along as I would like to start using this feature asap. Hannes ** The thread started by Bert at http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2010-April/149563.ht… ----------------------- Model subclass: #MyReallyNiceApplication instanceVariableNames: '' classVariableNames: '' poolDictionaries: '' category: 'MyMenuTests'! "-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- "! MyReallyNiceApplication class instanceVariableNames: ''! !MyReallyNiceApplication class methodsFor: 'as yet unclassified' stamp: 'hjh 4/26/2010 08:52'! menuEntrySpecification "Test to add another entyr in the Help menu" ^MenuEntrySpec newForDockingBarFrom: (Dictionary newFromPairs: #( #contents 'Hello?' #location #('Help' 'a subMenu' 'another subMenu') #target MenuMorph #selector #inform: #arguments #('Hello World!!') )) ! !

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Meeting Report for 4/21/2010
by Bert Freudenberg 04 May '10

04 May '10

http://squeakboard.wordpress.com/2010/04/23/meeting-report-for-4212010/ Last week we decided to do notes in a round-robin manner, so Bert is writing the report this time. Everyone except Randal was present (Andreas, Bert, Chris, Craig, Jecel, Juan). First we had some virtual champagne over the 4.1 release. Yay! Might need a little more publicizing though. Joining the SFC is still a top-priority. We received a current draft of the agreement. We are putting it up here [1], please have a look if you are interested. We spent some time discussing the new interest in documentation, which we are very excited about. To give this the proper visibility, we think it should be made part of the release, and also be linked directly from squeak.org. To arrive at a plan of action swifter than by week-long mailing list discussions, we suggest that the interested folks meet on IRC soon. Jecel pointed out that on the project list [2], there were few commercial applications listed done in Squeak. That might give the impression that the community was somehow opposed to commercial use, which couldn’t be further from the truth. So let’s add some commercial examples there (and if there are too many, make another page). Please send in links with a short description! Finally we want to thank Ian Trudel for taking the initiative with surveying [3] the community. We support the initiative, and are eager to see the results so we can take them into account in our future work. And remember, anyone subscribed to squeak-dev can now contact the Board directly at board(a)squeak.org thanks to magic pixy dust sprinkled by Ken on every one of you! [1] http://ftp.squeak.org/docs/squeak-sponsorship-agreement-apr19.pdf [2] http://www.squeak.org/Projects/ [3] http://lists.squeak.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2010-April/149047.html - Bert - (for the SOBs)

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looks evolution
by Chris Muller 04 May '10

04 May '10

What do folks think about each major Squeak release having slightly different appearance? It seems to have happened, perhaps "naturally," with every version since Squeak 2.9, at least. I think it's great for each release to have its own "personality". A different background is a great place to start for keeping things fresh with new looks. Is 4.1 using a small tiled picture of some kind? Here is an alternative which I think looks kind of like rough construction paper. 12K though.. - Chris

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Proposal: Project Pink Book
by Casey Ransberger 02 May '10

02 May '10

Please find the attached proposal. In a workspace, do self braceFor: #theHorror. Seriously, though, I decided to go full-bore with the crazy ideas here. I would very much appreciate feedback of the constructively critical variety. If people really hate these ideas, I can go back to the drawing board, and come back with something folks can get behind. To be clear: I'd rather not do it all by myself, so I will be receptive to what you have to say about it. I am, myself, somewhat concerned that I may have erred a bit far on the side of tools; OTOH, I suspect that part of the reason mine was the only hand that went up when volunteers were called upon for the 4.0 release may have been: it was not a technically sexy release, and ours is a community of engineers. So maybe the tool ideas will go over well and get people engaged, I don't know. Anyway, I'm dying to hear what people think!

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