Squeak and ST in general (3)

Christian Langreiter c.langreiter at tirol.com
Thu Nov 18 16:58:27 UTC 1999


Mark -

I know Director fairly well and I agree with you on most points (but I can't
support your impression that D is slower than Squeak - at least when it comes
to the important things - e.g. visualization of small sprites).

Maybe we should think a bit about what would be needed to make Squeak-based
multimedia products possible, what would be the issues with installing software
on customer's computers (distribution issues), how to efficiently build up
projects, how to improve the animation capabilities (perhaps a timeline for
PasteUpMorphs or even every single morph wouldn't be such a bad idea ...
combined with flexible paths associable to every moprh ... Huh!) and Font
support, as well as user-accessible scriptability ...

The framework is already present to a certain extent in Squeak, but Macromedia
won't have to be worried for a long period of time (Flash is more important
than Director nowadays, anyway - and Squeak won't ever beat this one in terms
of size [250k] and speed).

-- Chris

Mark Guzdial wrote:

> I take a different perspective on Squeak.  Your critique of Squeak is
> contrasting it with different Smalltalks for the purpose of writing
> application programs.  While it could be used for that, I don't think
> that that's its greatest strength.
>
> Squeak is for creating Dynabooks -- personal dynamic media.  The idea
> is to make it easy to create and experience computational media, in
> all the myriad forms it currently takes and will take in the future.
> No other Smalltalk (or Scheme) comes close to going after that goal.
> In that sense, a better comparison might be between Squeak and
> Director.
>
> Director is clearly the predominant package for creating multimedia
> content.  (It seems like every CD my kids have bought in the last
> three years was done in Director.)  Let's contrast Director and
> Squeak:
> - Director supports lots of media formats (Flash, JPEG, GIF, WAV,
> AIFF).  Squeak supports more (e.g., VRML, MIDI).
> - Director is an awful programming space -- bad programming tools, no
> ability to create abstractions.  Squeak is fabulous as a programming
> space.
> - Director is Mac and Windows only. Squeak is cross-platform
> including smaller and larger systems.
> - Director makes it easy to compose new media.  Squeak's composition
> tools are there, but aren't as powerful yet.
> - Director is easy for non-programmers to use.  Squeak has
> Viewers/etoys, and it's getting better.
> - Director is proprietary, and releases come occasionally.  Squeak is
> open source with lots of people building things and new releases
> coming out very often.
> - Squeak is magnitudes faster than Director.
>
> If I were Macromedia, I'd be more than a bit worried...
>
> Mark
> --------------------------
> Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing : Atlanta, GA 30332-0280
> (404) 894-5618 : Fax (404) 894-0673 : guzdial at cc.gatech.edu
> http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html





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