[squeak-dev] Re: Talking to Steve Jobs about Scratch.

Bert Freudenberg bert at freudenbergs.de
Fri Jun 11 12:41:10 UTC 2010


On 11.06.2010, at 07:43, John M McIntosh wrote:

> Well I was hoping to have a few more days to settle things. 
> 
> The Smalltalk community should take a deep bow and thank Alan Kay for spending many hours talking to the highest level of people at Apple about the importance of the iPad as a platform to teach computational theory to people of all ages. 
> 
> So how does this all sort out? Well I don't know, nothing has officially changed, yet...
> 
> But I'm at WWDC this week, I did talk to the manager of the App Store (they were expecting me) and I do have an appointment with Apple next week to discuss the "Unless otherwise approved by Apple in writing"
> 
> Once that happens I will let everyone know the outcome, Apple is working what the approval process is, and I think the Smalltalk & Scratch community will be the first players in the door for Apple's embracing of interpreted languages for educational purposes on the iPad. 
> 
> I must publicly thank the Smalltalk and Scratch communities for being patient and polite in waiting for the issue to resolve itself, and true thanks should be directed to Alan for his behind the scenes efforts in ensuring the Computer Science community has equal footing with the language arts & music departments for apps on the iPad.

Thanks to you, too! :)

> I caution everyone that we're not there yet, but let's see what happens next week, so don't open the champaign bottles yet. 

Well, the Apple approval would only remove one obstacle. The bigger issue is actually making a suitable touch interface for either Etoys or Scratch. I don't think Alan had these concrete apps in mind, but rather the general ability to run this kind of software.

Case in point: I got Etoys running on the iPad, using John's VM, slightly modified to allow multi-touch etc. Works in Morphic, which always supported multiple hands. But while it does work, it sill feels like a desktop app. Plus it drains the battery so fast it's not funny.

We're going to have to work on that eventually, though the main motivation would be the planned OLPC tablet.

- Bert -

> On 2010-06-10, at 7:40 PM, Lawson English wrote:
> 
>> Does this change the status of Scratch on iphone any?
>> 
>> http://www.appleoutsider.com/2010/06/10/hello-lua/
>> 
>> 
>> Lawson
> 
> --
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> John M. McIntosh <johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com>   Twitter:  squeaker68882
> Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd.  http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com
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