Folks -

Last week I committed to bring everyone up to date on our active projects.  Andreas and I covered the future of Morphic and underlying graphics just before the weekend.  There are three more parts that I intended to cover in messages and then place on the wiki -- a short intro, support for first-time users, and an architecture for partitioning and distributing Squeak images over the internet.

Here follow the introductory paragraphs and the section on support for first-time users.  All that then remains is the image segmentation and distribution stuff which I shall assemble from a  couple of earlier messages on that topic.

Comments are welcome, but maybe best not to copy them to the whole list.

	- Dan
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Where we are headed generally
We have written about this fairly recently so, in the interest of focussing on more specific topics, we'll let that stand for now.  You are referred to the latter part of *The Future of Squeak* 	http://squeak.org/headed.html or http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/393, and other nearby links for this background.

The next couple of months
We feel this is a critical time for Squeak.  On the one hand Squeak has grown to a mature system with substantial media support and a fairly complete set of networking facilities, all integrated within a clean and powerful programming environment.  On the other hand, it still falls short in ease of use for the vast Internet community wherein lies its greatest potential.  In this situation, our most immediate goals are...

	Simplify the language and programming environment for first-time users
	(Here below)

	Rework Squeak's underlying graphics facilities and the Morphic framework as well
	(In last week's message)

	Establish an architecture for partitioning and distributing Squeak images over the Internet
	(Yet to come)

Each of these goals is being addressed by an active project at Squeak Central.  These projects are our daily focus, and we hope to have major results in the next month or two.  Here is a bit more detail so that you can better understand what may change as a result.

Support for first-time users
There are four aspects to this work as we see it right now.  First, we are experimenting with an alternative syntax.  There are numerous possible ingredients here, including the use of fonts and indenting to indicate structure, alternatives to keywords in expressions, reserved words for control, and so on.  The one ground rule for now is not to change the underlying method format, both to limit our task, and to ensure that the entire system is accessible with the alternative syntax.  We are carrying out the first stage of this investigation by making changes to the pretty-printer, and then browsing the system to see how it looks.  Once we decide on a format we like, we'll turn to the task of compiling it.

The second spect is to make the entire world of Squeak and its objects be more concretely accessible.  We are currently thinking of this as somewhere between Morphic Wrappers and Fabrik without wires, with a flexible component set always available from a parts bin.

The third aspect of this work is a framework designed to move seamlessly from the kind of scratch programming one does in a workspace to the full spectrum of Squeak development.  The heart of this project will be the design of an integrated inspector/browser/debugger -- a sort of object operating table in which you have concrete control over everything about the object being examined.

The fourth aspect of this effort will probably come toward the end of the project, and that is to bring about a natural integration of the existing "Etoy" scripting tiles with these new facilities.  This will also involve a reexamination of the stepping and event-handling facilities in the light of the generalized event-handling planned for the redesign of Morphic.