[squeak-dev] Re: A little 4.1 press coverage

Michael Davies mykdavies+squeak at gmail.com
Wed Apr 28 20:11:25 UTC 2010


On 28 April 2010 01:06, Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de> wrote:

> On 28.04.2010, at 00:23, Michael Davies wrote:
>
> The new UI work and the increasing use of "one-click images" get rid of two
> of the obstacles that have put many of these casual browsers off trying
> Squeak;
>
>
> That caught my eye. How do people actually develop with "one-click images"?
> I mean, I came up with that concept in the first place, but it was meant for
> deploying applications, not for development. You can't even save the image
> under a different name. So while I see the appeal to people giving it a
> casual look, do you really think that should be the default download?
>
>  - Bert -
>

The great thing about the one-click image is that it's such a powerful way
to get people hooked. If you've got, say, a Mandelbrot generator that you
want to show to people, it's great to be able to drop it into a one-click
image, put it and an appealing image on your blog and say to the world "just
download it and run it, it works identically on Windows, OS X and Linux, oh
and if you want to understand how it works, the source code's included, oh
and it's got a powerful development environment in there as well". People
can then get a taste for the Squeak environment and perhaps explore the
development tools without even caring that there's an "image" there. Once
you've captured their interest and they start thinking about using Squeak
themselves, they'll be more willing to put in that little bit of effort to
understand what images and sources and changes and FFI and DLLs and VMs and
changesets and mczs and packages all mean.

I wouldn't make a one-click image the default download that you're pointed
to on squeak.org, but you question did make me think; perhaps there should
be a "Taste of Squeak" one-click image based on the 4.1 release, with a few
of the more appealing packages pre-installed - a combination of 4.1's
un-threatening UI and in-image help, with some of Edgar's FunSqueak ideas
could be really attractive.
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