> Lawson English: Disney uses Squeak internally to
> storyboard animations. They are porting Panda3D,
> Disney's own virtual reality engine that they use
> for Disney computer-graphics cartoons, to Squeak.
Alain: Impressive! It points to a fruitful and durable
future for Squeak. Disney is and always has been a
beacon/reference/trend-setter in this regard.
> Lawson English: Disney is apparently planning on
> using it all over the place in their theme parks
> or so one gathers.
Alain: That would/will provide Squeak with the
necessary initial market to support its further
development. And it would/will be highly visible proof
of its viability.
> Alain Farmer: And perhaps persuade them, in time, to
> lean even more towards a HyperCard-like interface
> and/or scripting language .. or an OSA-like
> architecture that permits several scripting
> languages to be employed, among them HyperTalk.
> I am personally considering using Squeak to
> rapidly prototype FreeCard/FreeScript.
Alain: How about it, FreeCarders. Do we do everything
from scratch, as we are doing now? Or do we leap-frog
over several development steps by adopting Squeak as
our base? As you no doubt noted in the enumeration of
things you can do with Squeak now and/or soon, we
would be light-years ahead of where we stand now.
Colour, 3D, graphics, OOP, multi-platform deployment,
etc. Even PDAs are supported, which is a growing trend
in distance education (my main market).
> Lawson English: Not at all. The Philosophy of Squeak
> (TM) is, quite literally (to quote Alan Kay and the
> rest), "to make a HyperCard done right."
Alain: You gotta love that!
> Lawson English: They have the power of Disney
> behind them, which apparently is planning on
> using it in kiosks, PDA's, and so on.
Alain: Disney is huge (understatement). The upcoming
competition/struggle/battle for web market share will
surely be more concerned with CONTENT (later) than
with the underlying infrastructure (now). In my
entourage, content is so often cited as the really
strategic stakes of the web, that it has almost become
a clich�. Most of it is either wishful-thinking
(optimists) or doomsday scenarios where evil
technology is uprooting humanistic educational
practices (pessimists). But sooner or later, they will
be centered on content.
> They're working with Sega to get it on the
Dreamcast,
> and would like to get it to work on Playstation and
> Playstation II if Sony will play with them.
Alain: Another really huge market! Game-playing
consoles have been THE hot consumer item for years
now. For better or for worse, gaming is the most
prosperous application-type of the Web, and of
computers in general too. The potential for real-time
multi-user gaming thru the Web is sure to catch on.
Alain: Sony and Apple collaborate closely together,
don't they? Sony is the patent holder on all of the
CD-ROM formats, and Apple has bundled CDROM drives
with most of their products long before anyone else
dared to.
> Scott Raney: If so, where is the scripting language
> support? I think you've missed the point: they
> *want* you to program in Smalltalk...
Alain: At this early stage of the project, they have
not selected a scripting language. While I know that
some or all of MC's external windows are created in
MC/MetaTalk, I doubt that we could have complete
programming access to every component of the MetaCard
application, as Squeak does. All of Squeak's
components are written in SmallTalk, even the Virtual
Machine, the app, etc.
> Alain: Squeak seems to be everything that I wished
> for. You have changed my life, Lawson! Thanks a
> million. I am definitely going to participate.
> Scott Raney: Umm, not to be a wet blanket, but have
> you ever actually *used* Squeak or even any other
> Smalltalk environment?
Alain: Not yet.
> Scott Raney: It's huge, slow, monolithic,
> very hard to understand and modify, and doesn't
> support the native GUI on any platform (the 1rst 4
> seem to be caracteristic of all Smalltalk
> environments ...
Alain: These are indeed damning points.
> Scott Raney: ... which explains the general
> failure of that language to attract more than
> an insignificant market share, despite the
> heroic efforts over 20 years of many, many
> companies, most of which died in the attempt.
Alain: This point is a little more dubious though. The
same argument could be leveled against all of the
current and past xCards: e.g. insignificant market
share despite heroic efforts of many players. The more
fundamental reason, I believe, is that the mainstream
is perceived as wanting ready-made consummable
software. Very few of us in society at large ever dig
deep enough to want to roll-our-own (create).
> Lawson English: How huge is huge? The Netscape
> plug-in version of the Squeak Virtual Machine is
> less than 500K...
> Scott Raney: You have to download (or install) a
huge
> class library to do anything in Smalltalk, and that
> whole thing gets loaded into memory when you run
> even a trival "hello world" application.
Alain: Is this based on your experience with
SmallTalk? Or are you describing Java and
extrapolating from it to SmallTalk?
> Scott Raney: The Squeak kernel is currently
> at 5MB and is growing, not shrinking. This
> is about 4 times the size of any of the xTalk
> "kernels".
Alain: This is indeed damning. Hopefully they will
shrink the swelling, because when you shrink the
swelling ... euh ... you know the rest!
> Scott Raney: IMHO, it's essentially useless for any
> commercial application development ...
Alain: Is Disney out of their minds ? Do they have a
habit of supporting un-commercializable projects ?
Alain: Where FreeCard is concerned, I do not believe
that the adoption of Squeak would affect in any way
our relationship with you (MetaCard). You are
providing us with a licence to use MC for the purpose
of developing FreeCard's GUI (a GUI that MC will also
be able to use, of course). Meanwhile, Anthony is
endeavouring to provide FreeCard with its own
interpreter (an instance of his more generic
NuInterpreter) from scratch. And now I am suggesting
that FreeCard might want to adopt Squeak for
prototyping FreeCard, instead-of or in-addition-to our
two existing interpreters.
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