[Job] Squeak for NewtonOS?

Aaron J Reichow squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org
Tue Sep 10 04:10:17 UTC 2002


On Mon, 9 Sep 2002, Raymond wrote:

> it might be "relatively" easy (a few days work for a knowledgeable
> person in the Newton tools) to merge embedded Squeak with the shell I
> wrote for a Newton Forth (itself based on the Squeak work). But the
> result would only let you evaluate Squeak expressions in the notepad --
> it would not be the whole Squeak GUI system, and so would be mostly just
> a proof of concept or amusement. I'd actually try this for fun (and to
> say it was finally finished!) but unfortunately my main Mac (Quadra 630)
> hard drive died during a cross-country move and I haven't had the
> time/energy to resurrect it from backups.

Any means to hook into Squeak could be good.  That is, I'm willing to have
a Squeak engine on the Newton, with the GUI in NewtonScript.  There is
still power behind that sort of situation.  Also, I could look into how
they did the Waba port to Newton OS - Waba has it's own GUI drawn on some
sort of Newton OS canvas, with a WinCE or Palm OS look selectable.
However, Waba was designed to run in places like this, and as a result
prolly doesn't have a whacky event system like Morphic. :)

But as I was saying- as long as there is some way to hook into Squeak,
it's all we (I?) need.  I'm definately willing to reconstruct the tools I
need within this new framework.  There are a few ways of doing this, but
the easiest to implement (and I'd guess it's actually pretty easy!) would
be a very distinct line between the Newton OS and Squeak, with the GUI
side written using NTK (or NewtDevEnv with or without VisualNewt)
communicating with the Squeak VM.  If the Squeak side had to make a lot of
changes to a GUI built with NTK (in the GUI builder), passing back
NewtonScript wouldn't be perfect, but acceptable.

When you're talking about this kind of setup, the image gets mighty small-
probably around 1 MB for a lot of good stuff that doesn't involve Morphic.

Of course, in a perfect world, we'd have both this and real live Morphic
and MVC. :)

There are some files in http://www.unna.org/unna/development/NewtonDev/
that provides a ready-to-go, out-of-box Newton development system,
complete with the tools for developing both NewtonScript apps and C++
extensions.

Psst: don't tell my girlfriend, but I'm breaking down and buying another
Newt, found a 2100 for sale for a mere $75. I think I'm going to take a
whack at this myself, maybe try to track Paul down and get some pointers.

Regards,
Aaron

  Aaron Reichow  ::  UMD ACM Pres  ::  http://www.d.umn.edu/~reic0024/
"the profit system follows the path of least resistance and following the path
    of least resistance is what makes a river crooked."   ::  u. utah phillips






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