Squeak-dev July 2009

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126 participants
195 discussions

Winds of change
by Giuseppe Luigi Punzi 12 Aug '09

12 Aug '09

We have elections soon. I'ts time to think about the project. What we search? What new developers search? I think, probably, Squeak, needs a refactoring on the ideas behind. The people thath wants etoys, use etoys image. Croquet uses his own image. Now, at the moment (2009), I'm 90% sure, the people thath go to squeak.org, and get the latest Squeak, now, are developers searching a good smalltalk (something similar to VW but opensource I means) to use in their projects, not the use of Squeak as multimedia, or something similar. I know this for all spanish people ask me about Squeak, or developers "going out the list" searching Pharo, an approach to the things I say. I like the idea about a console squeak (like GST) with the objects living in memory, but not dependent of the "World", launching the actual Squeak World as an object (I don't know if is the actual behaviour, I only dream) if you want, or launching something like VW (or Dolphin) working over TK or GTK or WxWidgets or technologys like XUL instead.....I like the idea of an UI Painter....I like the idea of all Squeak tools running over web too..well, this idea don't like it very much :)..but I don't have the skills for all of this, for this I offer the ideas. But most important, is the community has vote for this things. The community needs to stay informed about the movements. I think, this, is the right direction. I don't know what you all think, but IMHO, it's the moment to get a new Squeak 4 from zero, trying to preserve the core classes, with new ideas and ambitions. I don't like very much the idea about all list hating me, but, after this mail, I know you hate me :P P.D.: Yes, probably, I'm crazy too.

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Cuis updated to #0250
by Juan Vuletich 10 Aug '09

10 Aug '09

A new release of Cuis is available at http://www.jvuletich.org/Cuis/Index.html . It includes some bugfixes and more cleanup. Biggest news is a lot of cleanup in the Text system. Gone are the ugly TextConstants pool and the old Paragraph class. TextStyle lost over half its instance variables and over 80% of its methods. I also added a TextEditor to the World menu that is not a Smalltalk Workspace and may be useful especially for end users. As usual, all the updates starting at #0001 are available separately, and described in http://www.jvuletich.org/Cuis/CategoriesAndChangeSets.txt . This could be useful for users of other Squeak images wanting some of the bug fixes and enhancements included in Cuis. Comments welcome. Cheers, Juan Vuletich

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the inbox :-)
by Michael Haupt 09 Aug '09

09 Aug '09

Hi, I was wondering why the inbox at http://source.squeak.org/inbox/ was so empty ever since its inception, so I simply thought I'd go ahead and use it for what it seems to be intended for: uploading things that might be useful to someone. I've uploaded a patch to Morphic that doesn't do much, it just adds some entries to the top of the World menu that would otherwise be available through one more click (browser, workspace, ...). Under the hood, I have refactored the World menu creation a bit - mostly, I have extracted some methods. So if you, out there, believe this makes sense, I'd be happy to move the patch over to the trunk. :-) Best, Michael

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step through VM source
by Ang Beepeng 07 Aug '09

07 Aug '09

I was looking at Croquet VM source code and stepping through the code. It seems like the interpret() loops forever, while I expect to find a point where it finished initialization and wait for user input. I know that it loops forever, but what is the VM doing before it gets any input from the user? Thanks. Ang Beepeng -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/step-through-VM-source-tp24678490p24678490.html Sent from the Squeak - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

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MethodDictionary implementation
by Ralph Boland 04 Aug '09

04 Aug '09

I have been looking at MethodDictionary. It seems to have very little to do with Methods. It seems to me that a better design would have been to have a class VarDictionary which does not use Associations (similar to MethodDictionary). MethodDictionary would inherit from VarDictionary and add the couple of additional methods it needs. VarDictionary would then be available for others to use. Better still would be to have MethodDictionary not be a variable class at all but simply use an additional variable "values". Again MethodDictionary should really inherit from a class that provides this service. I would use this service in my own code. Ralph Boland

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Squeak Callbacks support
by KiranMutt 02 Aug '09

02 Aug '09

Hello: I am working at interfacing an external C library ( static/dynamic ), in that context wanted to know, whether Squeak supports callbacks and any examples on using the same is highly appreciated. Thanks & Regards Kiran -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Squeak-Callbacks-support-tp24667323p24667323.html Sent from the Squeak - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

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Improved Truetype support
by Andreas Raab 01 Aug '09

01 Aug '09

Folks - I just finished a bit of work for supporting Truetype fonts directly from disk which will make it quite a bit easier to support non-latin languages. If you update your 3.10.2-trunk image, you will get support for TTFileDescription which is polymorphic with TTFontDescription but leaves the files on disk instead of reading them into memory and wasting tons of space. The attached picture shows a couple of Squeak Wikipedia entries rendered in Batang (a standard font on Windows which is 16MB on disk and would be, oh, I don't know, *big* if loaded into memory ;-) One of the nice effects is that because the files are left on disk, you can access your native platform fonts virtually for free (except that it affects portability of the image). The font menu in text morphs (Cmd-k/Alt-k) has consequently been extended to include a "More (non-portable) Fonts..." entry which now gives you access to all of the TTFs that we can find. The current list of search paths for fonts is hardcoded in TTFontDescription>>fontPathsDo: - if we're missing some, please add them in (this was mostly guesswork). An open question at this point to me is what the right combination of fonts for the next release might be. As far as I can tell, we have three basic choices: 1) Ship all the fonts with the image. Either Vera and friends in-memory, or Dejavu on disk. Nice and self-contained, but eats space. 2) Use all the fonts on the platform. Drop Vera and instead give people access to local fonts. Compact, but makes images less portable. 3) Do some combo of having a certain set of fonts in the image, for example Vera for basic LGC coverage and use platform fonts for the rest. Compact and portable unless you need the extended fonts. Any preferences? Opinions? Also, I'm interested in finding fonts that don't work. Those of you who have "interesting" fonts / scripts, if you could run a TTFileDescription loadAllFontFiles. to see if any of them blow up, that would be greatly appreciated. And of course any other comments, questions, and suggestions are welcome. Cheers, - Andreas

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a small issue with updating the trunk
by Michael Haupt 01 Aug '09

01 Aug '09

Hi, I just updated my "always up-to-date trunk image" and noticed that the progress bar box appearing would mention it downloads some packages that I know *for sure* are already installed. Updating *again*, immediately after that first update, would again mention some packages that should just have been installed. It doesn't seem to be a big problem (no errors or anything), but it just doesn't feel right. Can anyone confirm this behaviour? Even more important: what can be done about it? Best, Michael

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Re: [squeak-dev] Minimal window manager
by Gary Dunn 31 Jul '09

31 Jul '09

On Wednesday 29 Jul 2009 15:04:04 K. K. Subramaniam wrote: > On Wednesday 29 Jul 2009 2:29:57 pm Gary Dunn wrote: >> Has anyone tried running Squeak from X without a window manager per se? > > Yes. I once launched Squeak from a single user console on a machine that > had only 64MB RAM! Squeak can be run from within a desktop, directly from X > (use -fullscreen), within a browser (using npsqueak.so plugin) or directly > from the console (-vm-display-fbdev). Make sure you env settings and > permissions are setup correctly. E.g. > > $ startx /usr/local/bin/squeak -vm-display-X11 -swapbtn ~/squeak.image -- :1 > > $ squeak -vm-display-fbdev ~/squeak.image > > I am not sure how much these modes are supported, though. > > Subbu Thanks to everyone who replied. On FreeBSD 7.1 the best I could get was Squeak without a window manager and a World desktop that occupied about 80% of the screen. o -fullscreen option is documented bwt not recognized. o fbdev is not found, possibly unique to Linux. Question: why did eveyone specify device :1 when the default is :0? I got the Same results -- Gary Dunn, Honolulu osp(a)aloha.com http://openslate.net/ http://e9erust.blogspot.com/ Sent from a Newton 2100 via Mail V

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Re: [squeak-dev] Spell Check
by Gary Dunn 31 Jul '09

31 Jul '09

On Wed, 29 Jul 2009 09:46:06 John M McIntosh wrote: > (b) Don't be confused by the Sophie 1.0 which is based on squeak [snip] > > (c) Sophie 2.0 http://www.sophieproject.org written by a different > group/organization in Java First Alice is lost to Java, now Sophie. What does Java have that Squeak doesn't have? Bigger biceps? A better tan? Whiter teeth? Dos Equis? -- Gary Dunn, Honolulu osp(a)aloha.com http://openslate.net/ http://e9erust.blogspot.com/ Sent from a Newton 2100 via Mail V

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