[Newbies] Creating a coverflow effect in Squeak

[Ross Boylan]

On Mon, 2008-06-16 at 12:48 +0100, Marcus Strehlow wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I thought I'd also give you my thoughts on this. While in theory a
> replication of Apple's (actually SteelSkies') Cover Flow effect is
> possible to achieve in almost any development environment, with Squeak
> there are a couple of things to consider.
> 
> 2-Dimensional movement is possible and it would also be processed
> faster, as there is no hardware-accelerated computation and rendering
> is involved. 
Wouldn't lack of hardware acceleration make it slower?
> Although not the real Cover Flow, a .Mac-like caroussel (I hope I
> spelled that right) effect is achievable, and depending on the items
> that should be in the effect it would run more or less fast. As Squeak
> provides mechanisms for animating Morphs, this could be a possibility.
> 
> However, when it comes to 3-dimensional movement, it is a bit tricky
> on this one. The original Cover Flow by SteelSkies used OpenGL
> obviously for the effect. When Apple took it over, they ported the
> code into Quartz, and later Core Animation, which are obviously not
> available to other platforms itself the Mac OS X itself. So that said,
> OpenGL would be required for this effect. There is one implementation
> of OpenGL available for Squeak, which regrettably only runs under the
> Windows platform as it accesses DirectX if I remember that correctly.
My understanding is that Croquet, which is based on squeak, uses OpenGL
and does so on all platforms.

Ross