Folks -

I awoke this morning with a scene from the movie "Look who's Talking" in my mind (I've never really seen the whole movie, but I did pass by the tube when my family was watching this scene).  A 5- or 6-year old girl is having a fantasy of playing basketball (which she loves) with Michael Jordan (I think).  She utters the subject exhortation, and then procedes to go out and tear up the court.  I hope some of you recognize the scene.

At any rate, I have this feeling about Squeak right now.  It's a time when there are great challenges in every direction, but I also think we can get through them and be on a completely new plateau in a month or two.  It's also a time when we could use some help, so I figured it might be worth a message to the list.

My top priority
My sole focus, and I will be working with Ted and consulting with Andreas about this, is to bring together
	ImageSegment swapping
	Project export/import
	A simple name space architecture
Our goal is before the end of the year, to be able to start up a small kernel Squeak image, and then browse around to active content (remote projects) on the web, importing any that look interesting.  The new content would be swappable off the disk thereafter so it is quick to access, and yet doesn't make the image too big for small machines.

There are two ways outsiders can help with this -- first is to critique the design, and second is to test the result.  I greatly appreciate the feedback I got last month.  OOPSLA caused me to suspend the work, but I'm back at it again.  I plan to send out another message on this in the next day or two.

I think you can see that if this all works at all well, it will give us the effect of everyone in the world having access to the best Squeak demos and active tutorials.  Remember that we have a working eventRecorder with built-in compressed voice-over.  AND you can now launch Squeak from within Netscape.  Tee Hee.

You Can Help
The rest of the gruop is also pretty heavily loaded too, with John, Alan, and Scott focussed on end-user syntax and scripting issues, and Andreas up to his ears in polygons and JIT-Blt.  There are at least two small items that would help us, or at least help me, just to keep the pace going in this busy time.

World Within a World Window.
One of the tasks on my list is to implement a world within a world window for Morphic.  I would love to hand this off to someone else, and I know there are several Squeakers out there who could do the job.  Note that we already have the ability to have a morphic world in an MVC window.  What we need is a morphic world in a morphic window.  I got this partly working a month ago, and would be happy to pass along that code.  One tricky thing to deal with is:  is the inner world always active, or only when the window is active?  The latter would be simplest and would be adequate for now.  Another thing to deal with is global flaps.  Currently global flaps are single instances that get moved around from project to project.  The analogous thing to do for an inner world would be that when you activate the inner window, flaps disappear from the outer project and appear in the inner window.  An alternative would be not to show global flaps in nested worlds.

Collecting Recent Submissions to 2.7alpha
It would also save me a couple of days if someone could run through Squeak mail since the last time we were caught up with various enhancements and bug fixes.  It would be ideal if that person would assemble the submissions, help me pick out any that might be questionable, and make sure the rest are happy in 2.7apha.  I could then very easily turn the result around into the update stream.  That way we can all keep going forward while I'm working on other stuff.

Volunteers for either of the above?

Squeak Socket Primitives
I have held back from participating in this discussion because it is not an area in which I feel competent to make judgements.  However I think we're converging on an approach that makes the best of the existing primitive interface, and also takes advantage of Craig's work on Correspondents.  I'm going to stay out of details here, since if you get Squeak mail you have already been immersed in the whole discussion.  At any rate, we'll do what we can to bring this to closure in the next little while.

Jitter/J3/TGV/Squam, but not "Late for Lunch"
Ian seems to have his project well in hand, but I thought it deserves some mention in this list of semi-coordinated activity.  Ian has made great progress, as those of you who were at OOPSLA will be aware.  I'm hoping we can pick a reasonable plateau in the next few weeks and formally distribute a J3 VM, so that people can start enjoying the fruits of this very cool work.

	- Dan, for SqC