>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).

What sprite visualization have you tried that is slow?  I just tried this:

f _ Form fromUser.
0 to: 400 do: [:i |
	s _ Form fromDisplay: ((10 at i) extent: (f extent)).
	f displayAt: 10 at i.
	s displayAt: 10 at i.]

It lets me select a Form off the display (click in upperleft, drag to 
lowerright), then moves it at full speed down the display.  It's 
simple and braindead, but seemingly, pretty fast.

>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 ...


I think that the externalizable projects should give us an easy way 
to share lots of things.  But certainly, better composition tools 
(including more Font support) would be the rigth direction.

>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).

Did you know that you can create subsets of Flash movies into Flash 
movies in Squeak?  Use the red-halo menu on a Flash player, open the 
sorter, select a subset of the thumbnails, and press open movie.  My 
sense is that the pieces are there to replicate Flash in Squeak, but 
I haven't dug deep yet.

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