I have been thinking about this stuff as well.
Vista is out, and the places I read think Microsoft may have opened the door for some competition (due to trying to force DRM down everyone's throats, etc.). If Steve Jobs goes for it, Micheal Dell said he is interested in shipping Dells with Mac OS on them. Some people are even saying Linux may gain some big market share.
So what this means to me is, people will be looking for an easy way to make GUI applications on these platforms. I know nearly nothing about the MAC world, but in Linux the only RAD tool I am aware of is a code generator for GTK.
Now in Smalltalk we always say (and I believe) that we can be much more productive then other languages. So I think it may be time to prove it.
I don't know how many of you have used Dolphin, but it is an amazing system. It only works on windows, but the GUI is wonderful and looks just like a normal windows app. And what is more, after you build an application, it has tools to automatically package up the application you write and turn it into a MSI kind of package. This includes turning certain parts into DLL's so that if you write multiple applications they can share libraries, etc., etc..
And I think Dolphin is currently the perfect system for building native windows apps. You get as much, or more speed then a VB environment but vastly more power.
What would be nice, is if Squeak had something like this. A great GUI builder (maybe it has already) and some way that we could use some system to turn an application we write into a native Linux/Mac OS package. Well, native looking. If you check what Dolphin installs you would find a smalltalk interpreter in there. The payback with the installer is, we can then submit "binaries" to distributions like Debian for any applications we make. The end user doesn't need to know it is Smalltalk. If we end up becoming a big player in the Linux and/or MAC world, people will be *begging* us to share how we are doing it.
With a rapid GUI development tool bound with the productivity of the Smalltalk language and the platform independence of Squeak we could have quite an advantage in the native UI space. And I understand the concerns about making apps that do things that already exist, but what we have to remember is that all applications change all the time. What a Word processor looked like 5 years ago is a little different then what they look like today and will be still more different in another 5. Not drastically, but new features are being added. All we have to do is keep up with the features they have and add our own here and there. To take a page from Paul Graham's book, when ever a "competitor" adds a feature, we can have it the next day.
Think about Mozilla for example. They are pretty advanced, but it is an enormous code base in C. They can't add new core features quickly.
I still believe the web will play an even larger roll in the future then now, but we will always have to have *some* native apps (a browser if nothing else). And if MAC gets a bigger percentage of the desktop market share (and maybe even Linux), this could open up an opportunity that wasn't there before. And I don't think anyone can move to cover that gap as quick as Smalltalk can.
From: Brad Fuller brad@bradfuller.com Reply-To: The general-purpose Squeak developers listsqueak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org To: squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org Subject: Making Squeak more accessible and used - reversing the trend Date: Tue, 30 Jan 2007 18:05:01 -0800
All,
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