[squeakland] ManualSep13

Bert Freudenberg bert at freudenbergs.de
Wed Sep 22 09:54:24 EDT 2010


Morph is from the Greek "morphe" meaning "shape" or "form". The word is used with varying meanings in different contexts. See this wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morph

In Squeak, a Morph is a visual object, a basic building block of the user interface. Basically anything that you can get a halo on is a Morph. There are also some Morphs that have their halos disabled, but this is close enough. Try bringing up the halo on a  viewer for example. And then click again to see that it is made of other morphs, which are made of other morphs, etc. Everything you see is a Morph (Squeak also allows other graphics than Morphic, but Etoys does not use those).

In Etoys we normally do not use the term "morph". We don't have to, we just call them "objects" which can have "scripts". This is sufficient for beginners, and even for most advanced uses of Etoys.

If you look deeper though, an "Etoys Object" is made of two parts: a "player" that has the scripts, and a "costume" which is the morph that is visible on the screen.

When you create a new object (e.g. by painting or from the supplies flap) it does not have a player yet. You can see this by opening the "Players" tool from the supplies flap. Only if you open the viewer for an object, it gets a player. The player itself is invisible.

Now in some parts of the system, the term "morph" is used. These are usually not the Etoys parts, but the Squeak parts. As you noticed, Etoys is a deep system that is built on Squeak, and its Squeak roots shine through in some places. This is good as it might lead the learner to questions and to digging deeper.

Thank you for asking!

- Bert -

On 22.09.2010, at 14:44, Carlos Rabassa wrote:

> Subbu,
> 
> thanks for the message although is well above my level of knowledge.
> 
> By the way,  I have not yet attempted any experience in the area of Morphs.
> 
> I keep hearing the word but without much idea of the meaning,  or maybe having a very clear but wrong idea,  which is much worse.
> 
> I recently completed the translation to Spanish of all the words still missing, some 1,600 in the Sugar pages.
> 
> Someone might like to check the translations wherever it says MORPH.
> 
> My mind was close to what I see when someone is using the program Blender.
> 
> Am I any close?
> 
> Are those the objects attached to a grid that changes its shape?
> 
> Is that what they use in those films like the one about the guy who was old when he was born and lived backwards,  getting younger every day?
> 
> You may laugh at me but,  unless someone asks the questions ...
> 
> Carlos Rabassa
> Voluntario
> Red de Apoyo al Plan Ceibal
> Montevideo, Uruguay
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Sep 22, 2010, at 8:26 AM, K. K. Subramaniam wrote:
> 
>> On Wednesday 22 Sep 2010 5:15:34 pm Rita Freudenberg wrote:
>>> Then I probably didn't explain it good enough. It has nothing to do with
>>> saving here. You can draw many objects on your screen. But when you open a
>>> painting tool and start drawing, everything you draw before you click on
>>> "keep", will be one object. That's what I mean with "drawing on one page".
>> Strictly speaking what is being sketched is a dress for an object. For a new 
>> painting, the object is born when you press keep and the sketch becomes a 
>> birthday dress for it. When an existing morph is repainted, it gets a new 
>> dress.
>> 
>> BTW, not all objects wear a dress. When I enter the following Text :
>> Object allSubInstances size
>> and press CTRL+P and wait for a few seconds, I got 365,253. While the Text
>> Morph allSubInstances size
>> yielded only 1966. So naked objects outnumber dressed ones nearly 200 to 1!
>> 
>> Subbu
> 
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