Adult etoys - My dear wish

karl karl.ramberg at comhem.se
Mon Feb 5 21:15:23 UTC 2007


J F skrev:
> Sorry if you've received this 3 times, it never seemed to appear on the list
> the first 2 tries...
>
>
> Hello all,
> I feel compelled to add my point of view due to recent discussions on this
> list; I have kept quiet for a long time as I'm not a professional programmer
> and haven't contributed code so my point of view doesn't hold much weight
> but I hope to be expressing a wish that other silent readers have - if not,
> I'll quietly go away and see what other solutions can do for me.
> First, some background: I was first introduced to computers as a child, on
> Apple ][ machines at my father's work, on which I learned to program in
> basic, making little games. I then progressed to a ZX81 at home and then a
> spectrum, all of which there was an easy route into programming. I then
> spent around 15 years without a computer and when I finally got a PC was
> horrified - I had a computer which (out of the box) I couldn't use to
> compute!
>   

> I have since dirtied my hands with all sorts of programming languages and it
> took a long time before I stumbled over squeak. Squeak has been an amazing
> and enlightening adventure for me but I have never really used it. The thing
> that has kept me interested even though I don't use squeak (except to
> explore squeak itself) is Alan Kay's dynabook vision. This is how I'd like
> to use my computer (or even better, my pda.)
> Now in the next part of this mail I'm going to say all sorts of things that
> I'm sure many squeak developers will disagree with. I'm aware that squeak is
> being pulled in several directions simultaneously and everyone has their
> good reasons for doing so but I have to put my viewpoint across and deal
> with the flames. If any of this sounds blunt or naive, I'm sorry.
> There are many RAD ways of building native applications - wxPython, wxRuby,
> wxPerl... You get the idea. I'm sure wxGNUSmalltalk would be possible. For
> me, the beauty and the power of squeak is in the direct manipulation of
> objects.
> I would love to see Tweak in the main image. There is a lot of talk about
> cleaning up morphic and the huge effort it would require. Would it not be a
> better idea to spend that effort getting Tweak functional in the main image?
> I'm sure there are many ways that the etoys environment and tile scripting
> could be expanded upon to create more advanced programming possibilities for
> the non-expert like myself.
> One way in which this type of environment could be useful to the layperson
> (and I have many more ideas which I'll save for a later date) would be the
> types of things that people generally use (and abuse) spreadsheets for.
> For example, if we had a list that we could pull from a flap and then could
> produce a tile that sums all the elements or have a 'collect' tile that
> could be used to make a little script to add 15% to the values and populate
> a new list... These morphs (or tweaks) could be embedded into a bookmorph
> (booktweak?) and easily presented in an attractive manner. One could even
> use the animation capabilities that etoys already has to create motivational
> aids - a small drawing of an athlete who will reach the finishing line at
> the other side of the screen if the numbers add up right (those numbers
> could be your weight, the money you've earned, the amount of cigarettes
> you've smoked..)
> Anyway, I'm sure a lot of you have thought about the dynabook and about
> adult etoys and fantasised about what it could do. I just worry, maybe
> unjustly so that squeak is being developed by such competent programmers
> that the needs or wants of people like me who aren't programmers or maybe
> have it as a hobby gets overlooked. I think that adult etoys
> --
>
> James Fenn - Guitarist
> www.jamesfenn.co.uk
>  would be the killer app (environment or whatever you would call it) for
> squeak.
> Many thanks to all of you for such an amazing piece of software,
> James
>
>
>
>
>   
Hello, interesting post.
I think etoys are great and I enjoy programming with them. But you reach 
some of it's limitations pretty fast and you will have to get your hands 
dirty with smalltalk code ( not too bad.) There are quite a few 
enhancements to etoys in the OLPC image:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar_EToys

And here is a spreadsheet etoy called Skeleton:
http://www.languagegame.org:8080/ggame/11

I have not used Skeleton my self, so I can't comment on it. But it looks 
very interesting.

Karl





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