"Frank Shearar" frank.shearar@rnid.org.uk writes:
I've read talk here and there about Squeak being ported (or people wanting to port it) to the Symbian platform (Nokia 9210, etc).
I was just wanting to know if anyone knows the status of any attempts to do this?
I have the SDK for the 9210 and have ported a few languages to it (io [1], Ficl [2], and attempted Goo [3]).
I'd be keen to see Squeak on the 9210 and would be happy to dig into a port. Some things that would need to be overcome would be:
1) No mouse or stylus. Only a keyboard is available. There is a 'virtual cursor' that can be controlled with a direction pad but that could be quite painful to use.
2) Only 3MB or so of memory to play with. Is it even possible to pare Squeak down to run in this with Morphic? How about MVC?
3) A Symbian application is really a DLL. It can contain no static variables at all. Are the many global statics in the Squeak source?
4) The Symbian application can only have an 8KB stack. Is this sufficient?
5) It's possible to do an .exe on Symbian rather than an app which works around 3 and 4. But an .exe doesn't play nicely with the OS. It won't appear in task lists, can't be switched to, etc. But I'd accept that if needed to get it going.
[1] http://www.dekorte.com/Software/C/Io/ [2] http://ficl.sf.net [3] http://www.googoogaga.org
Chris.
Chris Double chris@double.co.nz said:
- No mouse or stylus. Only a keyboard is available. There is a
'virtual cursor' that can be controlled with a direction pad but that could be quite painful to use.
There's a project on SourceForge (called epocmouse or something like that) that strives to develop the hard- and software to enable you to attach a mouse to the Communicator. The hardware seems to be there (schematics are on the site), and I think reading the serial port for mouse information would be not very hard. The project seems to have stalled; it's probably quite complex to insert a mouse driver into the OS and have it replace the direction pad, but I think on the level of a Squeak VM this would be a much simpler thing to tackle.
"Cees de Groot" cg@cdegroot.com wrote in message news:alprv3$s9t$1@home.cdegroot.com...
Chris Double chris@double.co.nz said:
- No mouse or stylus. Only a keyboard is available. There is a
'virtual cursor' that can be controlled with a direction pad but that could be quite painful to use.
There's a project on SourceForge (called epocmouse or something like that) that strives to develop the hard- and software to enable you to attach a
mouse
to the Communicator. The hardware seems to be there (schematics are on the site), and I think reading the serial port for mouse information would be
not
very hard. The project seems to have stalled; it's probably quite complex
to
insert a mouse driver into the OS and have it replace the direction pad,
but I
think on the level of a Squeak VM this would be a much simpler thing to tackle.
Is it then not feasible to write a mouse simulator that wraps the direction pad? I've only done a couple hours' work with the Symbian SDK, so I'm pretty much clueless as to its workings, unfortunately.
Would one then be able to craft a VM that didn't use a mouse? I'm thinking here of being able to write applications in Squeak to run on the phone, much as one writes Java ME apps...
frank
Frank Shearar frank@angband.za.org said:
Is it then not feasible to write a mouse simulator that wraps the direction pad? I've only done a couple hours' work with the Symbian SDK, so I'm pretty much clueless as to its workings, unfortunately.
I think that's quite possible, but usability sucks. The direction pad is a very stupid idea, and I don't want to access Squeak - even on my phone - through stupid ideas.
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Frank Shearar