<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">Hi Avi,</font>
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<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">Ambrai Smalltalk has been in development for a LONG time (since about 1998 if I remember correctly). It is the work of only two guys with more or less, one working mostly on VM type things and both working on image side stuff. They gave a presentation/demonstration at the Ottawa-Carleton Smalltalk Users Group last fall. I believe it's long history is why it is carbon and not cocoa. I think they already had a lot of code written pre-OS X.</font>
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<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">One thing that bothered me about it is that native UI widgets don't get garbage collected - you have to manage that yourself. From what they said at the presentation this is fairly common with native UI's. Most of my experience is with Smalltalk/V (pre-Windows) and Squeak, so I haven't really seen how others deal with this.</font>
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<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">In any case, it's quite an impressive piece of work for only two guys.</font>
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<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif"> -Dean Swan</font>
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<td><font size=1 face="sans-serif"><b>Avi Bryant <avi@beta4.com></b></font>
<br><font size=1 face="sans-serif">Sent by: squeak-dev-bounces@lists.squeakfoundation.org</font>
<p><font size=1 face="sans-serif">06/25/04 03:59 PM</font>
<br><font size=1 face="sans-serif">Please respond to The general-purpose Squeak developers list </font>
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<br><font size=1 face="sans-serif"> To: The general-purpose Squeak developers list <squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org></font>
<br><font size=1 face="sans-serif"> cc: </font>
<br><font size=1 face="sans-serif"> Subject: Re: [ANN] Ambrai Smalltalk on mac OSX</font></table>
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On Jun 25, 2004, at 8:33 AM, Michael Latta wrote:<br>
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> Not bad at all for a first beta! Also because it uses native UI <br>
> elements it feels FAR faster than Squeak. Obviously because it uses <br>
> native UI elements you can not change them.<br>
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Yes, although I think we can do much better at native OS X UI in Squeak <br>
with the Objective C bridge, because we have access to the full AppKit <br>
class library rather than going through the C API as Ambrai does. <br>
There are lots of nice things about Ambrai, but I'm bewildered that <br>
they chose to use Carbon instead of Cocoa for the UI.<br>
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For those of us who care about such things, I think there's potentially <br>
a very nice model there for commercial use of Squeak: develop web apps <br>
on OS X using a native UI environment, and then deploy headless on <br>
linux or any other platform you care for.<br>
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Avi<br>
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