I want to document but I need to learn first!

Avi Bryant avi at beta4.com
Tue Mar 11 20:18:35 UTC 2003


On Tue, 11 Mar 2003, Dan Ingalls wrote:

> Another take on this that might interest you is my intention to
> revive a Fabrik-like system in Squeak (see
> http://users.ipa.net/~dwighth/smalltalk/Fabrik/Fabrik.html).  This is
> another thing that did not work out while we were at Disney.  The
> idea is just to make it really simple to do little "computational
> sketches" in Squeak, whether with wires or with little
> spreadsheet-like tables, and with probably some overlap with Morphic
> Wrappers.  My metaphor for this is to turn any pen computer into the
> proverbial "back of an envelope" for simple calculations.  It could
> then be married to some of the very cool parts of eToys, or possibly
> into a cool web scripting system.  For the latter I have in mind a
> different marriage to, eg, screen-scraping and Flash components, but
> this would require help from others.

Very cool.  Dan, this interests me in a couple of ways: the first is that
I've been playing recently with using Squeak for controlling theatrical
sound and lighting.  One thing I'd like to be able to do is let sound and
lighting designers "wire up" a custom console of sliders, VU meters,
go-buttons, etc for a particular show.  The Max/MSP product does this
fairly successfully for realtime audio processing, but I think something
much cooler could be built in Squeak+Fabrik.

The second is that I'm intrigued by what a web-based Fabrik would look
like.  I'd be more inclined to do this with straight HTML and Seaside than
with Flash, etc - I think Seaside's UI model would be up to it now, though
obviously HTML itself is quite restrictive.

At any rate, I'm eager to hear more about where you're going with this.

Avi



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