Hi Hannes,

Thanks for taking the time to look at SqueakNews.

Here are some of the observations we made while developing Squeak News which can answer some of your questions:

Project numbers can be quite large (we tested over 100 projects) and it only has a minor affect in how much memory you are using (reasonably low overhead) , but what's in these projects really impact the size. We found that large bitmap images increase size significantly. Initially we had a nice background image, used for each project in the e-zine, it turned out it bumped the size about 2MBs per project so we had to take the background out.

BTW is there an easy way of sharing one image as a background in many projects and repainting from that common source instead of storing it with each project?

You can export all projects as image segments by using:

    Project storeAllInSegments

In Squeak News July issue we could reduce the size of the image from ~30MBs to 12MBs by using the above. All projects then become image segments taking about the same space in disk. However we didn't want to use the smaller image for the first issue because it wasn't tested enough. It also needed disk access with every project access, and running from a CD the hum coming from the drive especially with high speed CD rom drives and small CDs was somehow distracting. However for the future issues it seems we will have to use it.
There is also a beep when you access a project that is not in the memory and the comment next to it states that the beep shouldn't be a Squeak sound so we couldn't convert it to a nicer sound. The image segments stuff is quite fast you don't notice it without that beep if you comment it out.
I believe projects are swapped out from the memory when there is a memory crunch but I never tested that case. Perhaps somebody who knows more about projects can verify this.

You can also keep your project in the disk as a .pr file and load it in demand with
    ProjectLoading>>openFromDirectory:andFileName:
but this is considerably slower and not transparent as it is from image segments.

You can pretty much allow a lot of functionality or close the system to users  as you want. For instance in the very first screen of the e-zine all you can do is to press a few buttons. There are no menus and the e-zine will open itself up only after a certain button is clicked. The visible GeeMail text in the automatic scrolling window is locked so you can't execute any expressions at this stage. (I am curious: could anybody pass through the first screen without pressing the "I agree" button? I will offer a Squeak T-shirt to the first one who can, but don't tell anyone, just to me, otherwise no T-shirt!)  So if you want to deliver presentations that are severely restricted in the ways users interact with, you
could use similar techniques. The result would be indistinguishable from a PowerPoint presentation apart from the tricks that you can do in Squeak and can't do in PowerPoint!

Most of the Squeak News July issue presentation features were quick hacks but we are working on a set of electronic publishing tools, among them a project template system which you can define template projects and when creating a new project you can tell it to look like one of those templates. Once they are ready then I'll publish them along with documentation as a "guided backstage tour" of the e-zine.

Currently the presentation power Squeak has would beat most presentation systems hands down but it is not as easy as a presentation tool to access to some of these features.

Cheers

Tansel Ersavas
Editor - Squeak News
http://www.squeaknews.com

Hannes Hirzel wrote:

> Hi
>
> I'm using Squeak at the moment as a multimedia presentation system. I
> did'nt yet reach the limints (memory wise).
> In my working image
> Project allProjects size
> gives 82 and the image is 40MB. I run it on a 64MB laptop.
>
> I would be interested to have other figures. Especially how to proceed if
> the image size gets bigger than the available memory.

>
> With the InternalThreadNavigationMorph I can really keept track of the
> different projects. This is very nice.
>
> I read the first issue of SqueakNews: It gave me ideas how to present
> dynamic content. It convinces me to persue using Squeak for multimedia and
> CBT applications.

> Implementation characteristics of the SqueakNews July edition:
>
> - Use Projects as slides
> - Use your own navigator (well I think InternalThreadMorph would be fine
> as well)
> - Reduce WorldMenu entry list (class TheWorldMenu)
> - Disable the halos
> - Use ProjectViewMorphs for navigation (used in the table of contents)
> - Use GeeMailMorph for presenting articles (Pointer to documentation to
> how to's welcome)
>
> The system is not fully closed. So to look behind the scenes how things
> are done you often have the possiblity to type in a text somewhere like
> Workspace open
> World explore
> Browser openBrowser

>
> Hannes Hirzel