[Squeakland] How can the knights of the square brackets help the quest 2Be1?

[Markus Gaelli]

Hi Andreas,
>
>> Guess that they are in a really early stage, and want to get some   
>> more things settled before going public.
>
> Well you got a peek at work that is going on *right now*  
> (literally) at the OLPC offices.
:-)
>
>> But I wonder, what kinds of projects and tutorials will be on, and  
>> if  there will be any localization efforts for e.g. Nigeria or if  
>> English  is ok there.
>
> The way I understand it, all of it needs to be localized for the  
> deployment. However, we expect to work with native speakers for that.
>
>> I also wonder about the the future of Etoys for the 2Be1 - will  
>> the  next processors be fast enough to support Tweak - or will  
>> Tweak be  tweaked to support the current one?
>
> Our immediate goal is to make eToys run well on the current  
> hardware generation and that's looking good so far. We decided to  
> go with the "old" eToys version just because that meant we could  
> concentrate on dealing with those aspects that are specific to the  
> hardware and software platform - i.e., optimizing a few things,  
> making a nice integration with the sugar framework, providing more  
> examples and documentation.
>
>> Or will VP continue to enhance and tidy Etoys1? Tin Lizzie seems  
>> the  way to go....when can we start to play with Tin Lizzie?
>
> As soon as I find a bit of time to tidy up a release ;-)
Great news, looking forward to it.
>
>> Are we in "competition mode" -- are there signs that the python   
>> (Ruby?) communities come up with a decent system to substitute  
>> the  Squeak-Etoys version?
>
> I wouldn't call it "competition" - we try to encourage more  
> educational content and other languages only add to our vision and  
> aren't in conflict with it.
Yeah, right, with the open document format in place it should be  
quite transparent with which language/env the etoys are created.

Did anyone of you consider not to store the docs/specs of Etoys  
statically, but the commands to recreate the docs?
I am imagining sth like "Create standard playfield at 100 at 100 called  
SolarSystem / Change color of SolarSystem to black/ Drop standard  
ellipse into SolarSystem called sun/... and so on.
Sth. like a human readable prevayler.
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/wa-objprev/

Having a decent editor for this high level changesets (to eliminate  
all the bad trials) could create tutorials, etc out of it too. I  
think that Ted worked in that direction already.
>
>> The main question are: Can we help? How?
>
> There is always a bunch of issues that we could use help with. For  
> example, if you know someone who could work out Thai and Arabic  
> script setting in Squeak that would be quite helpful.  
> Alternatively, finding some time to work out a Pango integration  
> with Squeak would help (since we could leverage the work done by  
> OLPC for the languages that we don't support). Oh, and making  
> Squeak IPv6 ready would be helpful, too (looks like OLPC will use  
> IPv6). Also, it looks like OLPC will support CSound and we don't  
> have support for that either (but it'd be great if we could just  
> use the existing MIDI interface for it, etc).
According to
http://www.csounds.com/manual/html/OSCNetwork.html (what's in a  
name...;-)
csound comes with osc, and I happen to have written an osc-client and  
server for squeak found on Squeakmap, maybe this could be of some  
help to you?
http://map.squeak.org/package/61f807be-83a3-4944-bfa1-686ddac7153c
>
> Other than that, I think we have our bases covered so far. There is  
> a bunch of VM stuff needed (Ian is working on that), Sugar  
> integration (Bert is doing that) and a ton of UI fixes and tweaks  
> (Yoshiki, Takashi, and Scott are working on that). We're also  
> trying to work out some nicer tutorials (Takashi and Ted) and  
> trying to get tutorials and documentation in order (Kim and Alan).  
> I'm sure everybody could need some help here or there but  
> unfortunately we're working on tight schedules (there is an october  
> deadline looming over us which is the immediate goal to which at  
> least the initial integration and VM parts need to be done).
>
>> p.s. I forgot to mention and to thank Takashi Yamamiya San, who  
>> is  helping Yoshiki and Co. with the Etoys Part.
>
> You also forgot to mention Scott and Ted, and Takashi is doing a  
> lot more than just "helping" with eToys ;-)
Guess so. Thanks to Scott and Ted goes without saying... without  
those great guys no Etoys would have ever made it...:-)
>
Thanks Andreas!

Cheers,

Markus