Squeak on Jornada 720!

reic0024 at d.umn.edu reic0024 at d.umn.edu
Thu Jul 25 17:27:43 UTC 2002


Russell Allen <russell.allen at firebirdmedia.com> wrote:
> In the (increasing) amount of home grown pda code I'm using on my iPaq,
> I found that small optimisation techniques make a very large difference
> to the speed and usability of morphic on small machines; in particular
> caching copies of morphs I know I am going to use ahead of time (like
> MonthMorphs) means that I have squeak pda code which feels to me to be
> as fast as the inbuilt pda stuff.

Really?  I must admit, I'm very interested.  Would you be interested in
joining forces?  Or, if not that- and you wouldn't mind, I'd love to
have a look at your code, possibly to merge it into Dynapad. I can
understand that you may not have an interest in maintaining the system,
but just wanting to play with your own code.  

I'm especially interested in your claim wrt the bundled PIM stuff.  If
you have an image you wouldn't mind sharing, I'm dying to look at it. :P

> I think that the problems are not so much with morphic as such, but with
> the way the we are programming it - in particular treating morphs as
> things to be built and rebuilt constantly rather then live objects to be
> used and resused.

I totally agree.  However, there are Morphic speed issues that still
make themselves quite known even when using pretty well-designed
'programs.' For instance, try the Calculator in Dynapad.  Dead simple. 
I wouldn't say that there is reuse of of live objects, because there are
never new ones being grown- other than the string which grows when a
user hits a button, it's quite static.  But it's still a lot slower than
you'd think. :(  Feel free to look at it, if there's some trick I
haven't picked up on, I'd love to be set right... while entire class
itself isn't some picture of how to Squeak, it doesn't seem to me that
the way it deals with Morphic could be improved a lot.

Regards,
Aaron



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