Clever title:)

I'm new around here, but here's a short list of things that I fancy
(being the Fancy New Guy) doing with Squeak:

- Media. I want to kill Powerpoint. I've been playing around with a
minimalist "app" which hopes to fool the user into thinking they're
using a presentation program. I love how I can just drop things into
my image and get objects to play with.

- Themes. Something like Polymorph, but leaner. Working on it.

- Music. I want to make music with Squeak. Has anyone heard of Siren
or DynaPiano?

After this point, beware of crazy ideas...

- User interface. I want to jettison my desktop environment and live
in a Squeak image all the time. I'm sick of hating things about my
desktop environment, and finding that the cost of changing them is too
high. This desire necessitates the following three research ideas...

- Embed Firefox or WebKit in the Squeak VM.
- Implement a reparenting X11 window manager in Squeak, allowing it to
run GTK apps (like Firefox)
- Embed the v8 Javascript VM into the Squeak VM and then work on
making Scamper standards compliant. I tried rolling v8 into a plugin a
few months back, but found my ignorance of the Squeak VM to be a
barrier.

I think that modelessness is the way to go. I still need web-mode,
which is really the only thing (I want) that's hard to do entirely in
Smalltalk.

This thread is a lot more fun than the one where we argue about who's
ideas are *the* direction! :)

On Saturday, November 14, 2009, Andreas Raab <andreas.raab at gmx.de> wrote:
> Folks -
>
> I feel like the recent discussion about directions left us without much progress in terms of where we think Squeak is headed. I actually don't think this is particularly hard to formulate, since as we all know, Squeak will be headed where we make it head to. In other words, I think we could come up with a pretty good idea of where Squeak will be headed if those people who actually contribute tell a little bit more about their interests and directions. So let me be the first to start here:
>
> My long-term vision for Squeak is to bring it back to being a medium for personal dynamic media. I want Squeak to be a fun, educational, small, dynamic, media-centric environment. My current immediate directions include:
>
> * Making the system be more modular. Adding the Morphic TextEditors, refactoring Project, being able to unload various packages are in line with that. Expect more from me in this area as time allows.
>
> * Figuring out how to load packages, projects, etc back in. I haven't done much about this yet, but we desperately need better tools for (roughly speaking) "loading apps". Squeakmap gets some things right, Universes address others, both aren't very well integrated with Monticello, and by the end of the day the UIs for all of them suck.
>
> * Restore the media facilities. I'd really like to see the next Squeak version bring back Speech, bring back Games, bring back Wonderland etc. All in loadable project form so that people can explore them based on a small initial foot print.
>
> I'd be interested in hearing what others working on and in Squeak have to say about their own directions. Together it should give a pretty comprehensive understanding about where Squeak is headed in practice.
>
> Cheers,
>   - Andreas
>
>

-- 
Ron