[Newbies] Creating a coverflow effect in Squeak

Bert Freudenberg bert at freudenbergs.de
Mon Jun 16 19:10:24 UTC 2008


On 16.06.2008, at 20:25, Ross Boylan wrote:

> 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.

This sentence makes no sense. OpenGL is not DirectX.

> My understanding is that Croquet, which is based on squeak, uses  
> OpenGL
> and does so on all platforms.


Correct. Croquet can only use OpenGL. Balloon3D can use both OpenGL  
and Direct3D, which might be advantageous on Windows.

- Bert -



More information about the Beginners mailing list