You've hit on a lot of my exact reasons. When I make an application, it would be nice to be able to show it to my friends, and there is zero chance that they will actually install squeak. I can get away with this for some things by using the webbased squeak app... but not for desktop things. I like writing casual games and the AI applicable to them.
The fact that Sophie is available as a self-contained app based on Squeak (and MIT's Scratch? ) shows that with the correct dedication, and by following the correct procedures, one can package up an app using Squeak and have it be mass-consumed.
I worried about what you say too, but now what I'm working on can be entirely web-based so Squeak only needs to exist on the back-end. So that is lucky.
I could live with Squeak being an island if I were able to use it for my day-to-day internet use. From what I've seen, squeak doesn't even have a usable webbrowser... I can't read the newbies list from inside squeak, nor can I search the web for documentation and such.
At one time, Celeste was a much-used email client from within Squeak, and people browsed the web from within Squeak using Scamper. I have experimented with both in the past. I found Scamper was great for viewing the Swiki. Celeste was only POP at the time, IIRC, which kind of drove me away.
Over time, unfortunately, bit-rot takes these at one time completely functional applications and gives them subtle bugs. Keyboard focus problems, other keyboard command problems. It also seems Morph changes really have wide-ranging effects.
So, I can't really run outside of squeak, and I can't really run inside of squeak, but have this weird hybrid.
I think the goal at one time *was* to use Squeak as an entirely self-contained system, but it seems that the focus of today's leadership team is to make it a development platform only. That is kind of sad to me, because my initial thrill at Squeak was by looking at it as a platform. Unfortunately, like I said above, many of its applications are unstable and unmaintained in today's images.
If you are curious, pick up a 3.6 or 3.2 image and see what it used to be like...
- TimJ