On Jan 31, 2007, at 17:06 , Sebastian Nozzi wrote:
This isn't exactly newbie stuff, so I'd rather take this to squeak- dev.
I will then take this questions to squeak-dev and resort to more "newbie" ones...
In many places I have read things like Morphic will be replaced by Tweak, and that Tweak is much better and cleaner. This brings me some questions, like:
- Is this official? Is this in the roadmap of the main Squeak
project? (at least it appears to be in the roadmap of Croquet, and this is a very good sign).
It's not official. There are multiple UI projects being worked on in the community, which I think have better chances of getting adopted, because they're more traditional. Tweak goes beyond plain Smalltalk in various ways.
- Should I, as a newbie, forget about learning Morphic and jump
straight to Tweak instead?
There are many more people who could help you with Morphic, and the basic principles still hold in Tweak. So I'd go with Morphic for now.
- Will Tweak also offer this "embedding" of graphical objects in
one another to build up an interface (or "view"). Will it offer this ability to manipulate the graphic elements as Morphs offer?
Yes, it also has halos etc.
- The Tweak site seems to be out of maintenance and the mailing
list has very low traffic... are people still working on the project? (honestly asking) What is the state of Tweak? Is it feature complete? Is it half feature complete? (sorry if this info is somewhere else)
Well, the base system works, there is only the occasional fix - see, for example
http://source.impara.de/Tweak.html
(sort the versions by date to see recent commits). Nobody has time to update the website, I think impara moved servers so the download is broken, etc. Tweak is the 2D UI for Croquet and used in Sophie, for example. But there are few non-professional users yet, everyone is busy ...
There is no Rome list, as far as I know you are the first one trying to use it for Morphic rendering.
It's not that I want it specifically for Morphic rendering... I want Squeak and I want antialiased looks. If you tell me that Tweak is the future, and that in Tweak it would be easier to have antialiased graphics (with the plug-and-play ability of Morphs) I just jump for it... :-)
Well, it's still a tough walk. The Rome integration is a proof-of- concept, not more, really.
I always wondered why not many people (appearently not at all) are interested in antialiased graphics in Squeak. Even more being that it is so widely used in the Mac world, which all the graphic engine quartz antialiased stuff (I being also a Mac owner). For me, a live development environment with good 21st century graphics would be a clear winner...
Indeed. It's not even hard, but still a lot of work. Go for it :)
- Bert -