Hello Ties,
Thanks for your interest in Dr. Geo. I am happy to read your feedback regarding the limitation of Squeak to load efficiently external application like DrGeo.
Shipping an image in a DrGeo XO bundle is definitely an option but then you face another category of problems: what is happening when you want to save in the journal a DrGeo project? What will happen when you want to reload it? I am afraid of some collision between Etoys and DrGeo image.
It need some more though.
Frankly I am tempted by an even much more radical and long term sustainable approach:
- use the UIEnhancement to design a more full featured UI for DrGeo - design a Sugar theme for UIEnhancement - design a specific persistence mecanism for DrGeo activities - ship the whole in a Pharo Smalltalk image
The later one could be splited in Pharo+Efficient way to load external application.
A side effect of this will be to give us a true Smalltalk environment to write modern looking application for education.
Hilaire
2008/8/28 Ties Stuij cjstuij@gmail.com:
He Hilaire,
First off, congrats with your ESUG prize.
Secondly, I tried loading DrGeoII on the XO and experienced the 2.15 min. loading time.
Now I know this sounds obvious, but have you concidered just taking the pragmatic route: packing an image in the XO bundle? Loading a pre-geo-ed image takes about 13 secs on my XO. This will of course bloat it up by more than a couple of mb's, but if schools would actually integrate your app on an XO or comparable machine in the classroom, I'd say the 20-odd extra mb's are more than offset by not having to go through those annoyingly long loading/compiling times.
/Ties