Fellow Squeakers,
I have read the messages of others concerning Squeak's multimedia "promise" vs. what it is actually being used for. I think they raise some good points and Squeak isn't nearly what it could be. I'm one of those people who saw the multimedia aspects of Squeak and came to it for that purpose, when I opened it up I thought "Wow! There's so much good stuff in here! When will someone put it all together into something REALLY cool?" So Squeak to me is at the same time much more and much less than other multimedia programs.
Consider that animation is a very hot thing on the Web, yet Squeak has virtually no presence in this arena. It is nearly dominated instead by an awful little program called Macromedia Flash. In addition to hacking, I also draw comics and sometimes make the occasional animation. But it hasn't been since Autodesk Animator that I have found an animation program I actually liked. Squeak, as a complete programming environment with a fast graphical subsystem, has the potential to be far more powerful and capable than Flash ever was yet no one is doing anything with it in this regard.
Mind you, my purpose is not to turn Squeak into Flash, but rather to make things like "Homestar Runner" (a very popular and funny Web cartoon) possible in Squeak, in a manner that they really haven't been. My limited experience with Etoys suggests that while it is fine for the "drive-a-car demo", the educational materials, and other such things, making complex character behavior is much more cumbersome. Making a character walk across the screen is one thing: making him walk across the screen, stop, turn to face the viewer and say a few words (with complete mouth movement) is quite another.
I'm working on something I like to call MorphAgents. These are like Players in the Etoy world but the difference is that you can write a "script" (which is currently an array of positions and/or actions, one per frame) for the morph to follow and when you send the agent the play message the morph will follow the script you wrote. It is actually a prototype for a similar agents system that I want to port to C++ for use in high speed games (making "cut scenes" and so forth).
What I want to know is how much wheel-reinventing will I be doing here? I see bits of what I want to accomplish in FlashSpriteMorph and other places. But is this like, really easy to do in Etoys and I am just not proficient enough with them yet?
--Jeff