Hi Milan --
At 11:07 PM 1/25/2007, Milan Zimmermann wrote:
Hi Alan,
Thanks for the article, very interesting. For the eventual delivery mechanism it would be a great "trojan horse" (in a good sense of course) if the plugin, when not yet installed, could install itself as 1-click on the page, without having to download and install an .exe or .rpm. (That is really not relevant to OLPC because it can come with the system there, but great for rest of browser users).
Unfortunately browsers don't work that way. If JS and DOM were as capable and fast as Squeak this would be easy. But the very reason we have to download an executable plugin to run Squeak/Etoys is that the capabilities of the browser are still lacking. To me, this is a huge problem that needs to be resolved (in part because many American and other school children are prevented from any downloads that involve plugins and/or executables by the sysAdmins of their school district).
Last year, we did do a Logo entirely in the browser JS and DOM to see what could be done. This worked. So the answer is: some things but not enough.
Cheers,
Alan
I played with Tinlizzie a few months ago it was quite captivating, and amazing.
Thanks and later, Milan
On 2007 January 25 12:53, Alan Kay wrote:
Hi Milan --
Yes, it is much too early to talk about the new architecture (we are still thinking). However, it will be along the lines (but quite a bit further) of the WYSIwiki that we did as an experiment last year (and is written up in an excellent paper by Takashi Yamamiya, Yoshiki Ohshima, and Scott Wallace that was just presented at C5 in Kyoto.
Cheers,
Alan
At 11:03 PM 1/24/2007, Milan Zimmermann wrote:
On 2007 January 23 16:01, Alan Kay wrote:
Right --
Well, the next version of Etoys ... (heh heh) ...
trap for the impatient :)
Alan,
Is it too early to share some details about the architecture (I am wondering whether the new version will be based on Morphic, Tweak or something else, also whether existing projects are planned to be be loadable etc)
Thanks Milan
... will make it much much easier to expose new functionality to the children via the Etoys interface. Currently, this is doable, and people do it all the time (especially in Japan, Germany and Spain) but it is not a smooth process and reveals that Etoys started life as a demo and never got re-done as a real system.
The OLPC machine, besides being an impressive result just on its own, is also a strong forcing function for us to expand Etoys to a wider range of users and also to make a better architecture underneath (and these are in progress), Meanwhile, we have to hit the build deadlines of OLPC with the system we have.
However, it would be great to hear from you about the project you actually want to do in Etoys.
Cheers,
Alan
At 11:50 AM 1/23/2007, Steven Greenberg wrote:
On 1/23/07, Alan Kay <mailto:alan.kay@squeakland.orgalan.kay@squeakland.org> wrote: Hi Steven --
What you are trying to do is not Etoys, but to do something in Squeak Smalltalk using one of its graphics systems (called Morphic). Etoys is a UI that rides on top of Squeak Smalltalk. Its objects are called "Players" and the associated graphics of a player is called its "costume". Using Squeak Smalltalk, you can talk to the costume of a player by saying "self costume blah blah", where blah blah is a message that morphs understand.
Hi Alan, thanks for the answer. I think I actually do want EToys because I want my objects to be generically scriptable using tiles. That example I asked about was chosen because it's something I already know how to do in squeak :-). It's not the actual project, just a learning exercise.
Regards, Steve
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