Hi everyone, I've been lurking a little while here and thought I would jump in to see if Pharo would be appropriate for what I want to do.
First, here's a little background about myself. I'm an academic researcher in human-computer interaction and educational technology. I've been programming in Smalltalk since the early days of Squeak. For those who remember, I wrote Swiki. I'm now doing work on multi-touch interfaces, such as interactive tabletops and tablets. There's a huge difference between designing interfaces for mouse / keyboard and designing for multi-touch. My current research interests are in creating interfaces that are optimized for the latter, rather than the former. Smalltalk is a great environment for that, because you really can rebuild the GUI from the ground up. I've gone ahead and worked off the work that John McIntosh did on iSqueak to create several applications for iPad. I'm thinking of transitioning from Squeak to Pharo as the current development state of Pharo is a bit cleaner than Squeak. I'm glad to see that there is some interest in getting Pharo on iOS (though there do seem to be problem). I'm not an Objective-C or C expert, so I wouldn't be good at getting the VM to work, but I would be able to go from there to creating some interesting widgets, frameworks, and apps that I could share with the community. One major hurdle I see in my work is that Morphic is just too slow on iPads. While I have been able to optimize the speed of my applications to have them work on Morphic, it is a lot of extra work and I may eventually get to a point where it won't work for what I need it to do. Is there some sort of magic bullet for addressing this? Cairo? Does anyone have any recommendations for addressing this inside Pharo? I'm not interested in 3D interfaces, but rather fast 2D interfaces. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Cheers, Jeff -- Jochen "Jeff" Rick, Ph.D. http://www.je77.com/ Skype ID: jochenrick
