[etoys-dev] Additions to Etoys Reference Manual

[Edward Mokurai Cherlin]

I have completed a first pass over the draft Etoys Reference Manual,
adding as much information as I could easily find about Object types,
program tiles, tools, menus, and so on, and adding outlines for a
chapter on Etoys programming and a Glossary. More information is
needed.

I am in a strange position, learning Etoys by writing substantial
portions of its Reference Manual, something that I do not think would
be possible for any other programming system. I found the early
tutorials a delight, up to the point where everything else was
completely opaque to me. After learning a bit of Squeak, and getting
just a few more hints, I found Etoys starting to make real sense, and
now I can use a substantial subset of it. When I get through the parts
of this manual that I can do, I will turn to creating Etoys projects
to illustrate the issues I found missing, and to take up various
education topics. Some will be in the manner of my Turtle Art
tutorials and Tony Forster's, but of course Etoys supports doing far
more than that.

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/TurtleArt/Tutorials

Can anybody help with these Etoys objects that either need explanation
or are simply not present in the versions I have access to? In
particular, communication between Etoys sessions and users remains
entirely opaque to me.

Communications

Attachment Adjuster
Badge
Fridge
NebraskaServer


Objects not found in Object Catalog--Can we remove these?

Calendar
Dr. Geo http://www.olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic=676.0
Flap
Graph
Graphing
H Number Line
Key press
Speech Bubbles

Other

Arrow Editor
Image How to substitute another image?

Particles What is Kedama? http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1092381

Kedama: A GUI-Based Interactive Massively Parallel Particle Programming System
http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/VLHCC.2005.49
Purchase article: $19

http://community.ofset.org/index.php/Etoys_and_Kedama

I plan to combine redundant accounts of particular features, move a
few topics to what seems to me a more logical order, and add some more
topics. I especially plan to explain how Etoys development tools work,
and how one accesses Squeak development tools from Etoys. A tutorial
on either Etoys or Squeak development is, of course, inappropriate for
this manual, but I do want to demonstrate how one can look inside
Etoys object definitions using Squeak. This question is somewhat
confusing, because things may have different names and different
structures in their Etoys and Squeak manifestations. Has anybody ever
made a tool for exposing the structure of the Squeak definitions of
Etoys objects?

Lots more questions to come.

-- 
Edward Mokurai (默雷/निशब्दगर्ज/نشبدگرج) Cherlin
Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination.
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Replacing_Textbooks