I have been thinking about this stuff as well.

Vista is out, and the places I read think Microsoft may have opened the door 
for some competition (due to trying to force DRM down everyone's throats, 
etc.).  If Steve Jobs goes for it, Micheal Dell said he is interested in 
shipping Dells with Mac OS on them.  Some people are even saying Linux may 
gain some big market share.

So what this means to me is, people will be looking for an easy way to make 
GUI applications on these platforms.  I know nearly nothing about the MAC 
world, but in Linux the only RAD tool I am aware of is a code generator for 
GTK.

Now in Smalltalk we always say (and I believe) that we can be much more 
productive then other languages.  So I think it may be time to prove it.

I don't know how many of you have used Dolphin, but it is an amazing system. 
  It only works on windows, but the GUI is wonderful and looks just like a 
normal windows app.  And what is more, after you build an application, it 
has tools to automatically package up the application you write and turn it 
into a MSI kind of package.  This includes turning certain parts into DLL's 
so that if you write multiple applications they can share libraries, etc., 
etc..

And I think Dolphin is currently the perfect system for building native 
windows apps.  You get as much, or more speed then a VB environment but 
vastly more power.

What would be nice, is if Squeak had something like this.  A great GUI 
builder (maybe it has already) and some way that we could use some system to 
turn an application we write into a native Linux/Mac OS package.  Well, 
native looking.  If you check what Dolphin installs you would find a 
smalltalk interpreter in there.  The payback with the installer is, we can 
then submit "binaries" to distributions like Debian for any applications we 
make.  The end user doesn't need to know it is Smalltalk.  If we end up 
becoming a big player in the Linux and/or MAC world, people will be 
*begging* us to share how we are doing it.

With a rapid GUI development tool bound with the productivity of the 
Smalltalk language and the platform independence of Squeak we could have 
quite an advantage in the native UI space.  And I understand the concerns 
about making apps that do things that already exist, but what we have to 
remember is that all applications change all the time.  What a Word 
processor looked like 5 years ago is a little different then what they look 
like today and will be still more different in another 5.  Not drastically, 
but new features are being added.  All we have to do is keep up with the 
features they have and add our own here and there.  To take a page from Paul 
Graham's book, when ever a "competitor" adds a feature, we can have it the 
next day.

Think about Mozilla for example.  They are pretty advanced, but it is an 
enormous code base in C.  They can't add new core features quickly.

I still believe the web will play an even larger roll in the future then 
now, but we will always have to have *some* native apps (a browser if 
nothing else).  And if MAC gets a bigger percentage of the desktop market 
share (and maybe even Linux), this could open up an opportunity that wasn't 
there before.  And I don't think anyone can move to cover that gap as quick 
as Smalltalk can.

>From: Brad Fuller <brad at bradfuller.com>
>Reply-To: The general-purpose Squeak developers 
>list<squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
>To: squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org
>Subject: Making Squeak more accessible and used - reversing the trend
>Date: Tue, 30 Jan 2007 18:05:01 -0800
>
>All,
><sniped>

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