I was actually pretty excited when I first ran across Squeak. Wow! A
system that would perform on ANY platform and had a nice "click and
create" user interface. I've used many programming languages and I tend
to lose interest due to the arduous "under the hood" coding. I've also
used authoring systems that don't really give me the control that I
would like to have. Now squeak looks promising...but, the lack of good
documentation has left me yearning. It seems like with the number of
educators that seem to be using Squeak, we would have some excellent
documentation in this community.

I did find a book titled "Squeak:A Quick Trip to ObjectLand". I forked
out the $40.00 and purchased the book. It is a good book. It certainly
deals with the language on a level that a beginner can understand, but
so far, it doesn't really address the use of Squeak using Morphic as in
Etoys. Now, maybe I'm way off base but I thought that one could program
Squeak through Morphic (click and make programs), then view the scripts
through Etoys' Morphic interface as well. I'm still trying to understand
the scripting behind the included games samples. Frankly, if I have to
give Squeak a year to figure out, I'll go back to Visual Basic or C and
put my year's worth of energy there since I've already invested time and
money with those languages.  I had hoped to use Squeak to develop on my
J-720, but after fighting for days to get Morphic installed, when I was
finally successful(Thanks to Dean and Andreas,Ned and Aaron), I found
that the Morphic popup menus are cut off by my J-720's shortened screen
real-estate. Is anyone aware of a way to scroll down to the bottom of
these menus using the J-720?

I also wonder if there are any commercial applications that have been or
are being developed using Squeak or is the VM just too large to make it
realistic to use in embedded applications.

I know this email is all over the board, but I can sure relate to the
sense of frustration that others are voicing over the lack of written
documentation to accompany Squeak. 

Alan Kay is probably one of the greatest programmers that ever wrote a
line of code. I sure wish that this language could become more widely
known and supported.  Just my 2 cents...

Incidentally, AARP had a nice little side bar regarding Alan Kay and the
Squeak language. Did anyone else catch it?