eToys surprises

Ned Konz ned at squeakland.org
Thu Dec 23 17:02:51 UTC 2004


On Wednesday 22 December 2004 12:02 am, Blake wrote:
> On Tue, 21 Dec 2004 22:28:12 -0800, Ned Konz <ned at squeakland.org> wrote:
> [lots of helpful stuff]
>
> Geez, thanks, Ned! Much appreciated!
>
> >> 1. The icons in the tutorials don't show up correctly (i.e., not lined
> >> up
> >> where they should be)
> >
> > What tutorials and what icons?
>
> The first two: painting and handles. For instance, on page 2, it says
> "These are the paint brushe sizes." Then there's a space for the expected
> icon. The icon actually appears over the beginning of the next sentence
> "Click on the paint brush". After the word "brush" is another space for
> the brush icon, which appears over the next phrase "to select".
>
> Or so it is on my machines.

It may be that these tutorials should be updated for the new version of the 
Squeakland image.

> >> 6. It's cool that eToys tells you when you try to remove a variable
> >> that's
> >> in use; an "undo" would also be nice.
> >
> > Yes.
>
> I was trying to figure out where it would go, though.

The Command History saves undo/redo information; look at the operations that 
are initiated from the halos. Most of these have undo.

> <<Do you want new *kinds of tiles* or just to *add new vocabulary items* to
> morphs? It's easy to do the latter.>>
>
> New vocabulary items would do the trick, I think. I need to add "sine" and
> "cosine" to numeric assignments. The Lunar Lander project I have in mind
> requires the ship to be able to actually change its heading, but I can't
> just use the forward script, obviously, because the effects of gravity
> have to be considered.

Ah. Well, it's easiest to add vocabulary items to Morphs (and to their 
Players, of course). My "Flexible Vocabularies" lets you make change sets 
that don't touch existing code, but just add vocabulary (you make a new name 
like "additionsToViewerCategoryMyStuff" and the things in there get added).

So one possibility (not exactly clean from an OO design point of view, but 
very easy to do) is to add Morph>>sineOf: and Morph>>cosineOf: (and their 
corresponding Player methods).

As for extending data type tiles, perhaps Scott can weigh in on these. I would 
have expected this to be possible in the DataType hierarchy, but this seems
not to be the case.

StandardScriptingSystem>>arithmeticalOperatorsAndHelpStrings appears to define 
the (binary) operators that you now see between Number tiles. However, I 
don't see an easy way to add a unary operator like sin or cos.

There is also a "vector" vocabulary that can be turned on by

 World installVectorVocabulary

and off by

 World abandonVocabularyPreference

but it hasn't necessarily been maintained actively (like many things in the 
image, this may have only worked for a couple of Alan's demos).
-- 
Ned Konz
http://bike-nomad.com/squeak/




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