Hi Amos,

2007/12/13, Amos <aaamos at gmail.com>:
> Although I've been developing in (VisualWorks) Smalltalk for a number
> of years, I'm an absolute newbie when it comes to Squeak. I downloaded
> and played around with Squeak 3.9 recently (because I was curious
> about Seaside) and was surprised to see how far Squeak has come since
> I last had a look a few years ago.
>
> Anyway, I've read a few helpfiles/wikis/tutorials/blogs/etc., saw
> several images available for download with several different browsers
> and tools loaded, and read about a few more that I haven't been able
> to find/load (OmniBrowser, Cees' RefractoringBrowser, Ramon's
> SentorsaBrowser). So I was wondering what you guys would recommend as
> a base image


I would advise you to use a squeak-dev or squeak-web image. See
http://damien.cassou.free.fr/squeak-dev.html for more information.
Feel free to ask any question about these images.


> and if you could point me to the right place for finding
> out how best to go about loading tools. (I've downloaded a few
> packages with the universe package browser, which was fairly
> intuitive, but couldn't find several things I was after - should I use
> that MonticelloBrowser instead? What's the difference?)


I can see 4 ways of loading things in your image:

- Universe: it's a set of packages known to work together. Every
package you find in the universe browser should be loadable into the
image. If it's not the case, please report the bug.
- Monticello: it's a kind of Store. There, you will find latest
versions of tools, not always stable.
- SqueakMap: it contains all the packages that have been released for
Squeak since SqueakMap creation. Most of the packages won't load, but
you can find things that can't be found anywhere else.
- Drag&Drop: if you download a file (either .mcz, .st, .sar, .cs...),
you can always drag & drop it into the squeak desktop and Squeak will
ask you what to do (load, explore...).


> Playing around with a few things, I missed the option to "dive into"
> an element from an Inspector and then "pop" back out to the previously
> inspected object(s)


you can always press ALT+i (or CTRL+i) on an element to inspect it.
So, you can "dive into" a field by just pressing this shortcut or
right clicking and selecting "inspect it".


> , so I modified the Inspector class to add those
> options. Is something like that useful enough to submit the code
> somewhere for others to load? Or am I re-inventing the wheel and
> someone's already done that?


It can be useful. What have you done exactly?


> Any help or pointers where to read up on this stuff would be greatly
> appreciated.

Any feedback on your user experience would be greatly appreciated too :-).

-- 
Damien Cassou