Hi all,
I haven't spoken up here for a while. I halted my squeak work and thinking for a while and am just now finding reason to think about it again.
One of the outside things I have stumbled onto is inkscape. a svg drawing program. I did work a while back to fix curved polygons and remove some limitations from stars. During that work I got to wondering if I was doing something important or just reinventing the wheel in squeak. I had not looked for ideas or inspiration much outside of the squeak morphic environment. Turns out I seem to have done a little of both but maybe much more wheel reinventing.
Inkscape is a drawing program with some pretty powerful features. I doesn't do a lot of scripting though it allows enough extensions that I have seen produced from it animations of gears in a clock.
The thing people who play with morphic will find interesting are the basic objects that inkscape supports and the way they use handles to support the various features. Compare our rectangles, ellipses and stars to theirs. Notice that they also have ways to manipulate paths and add a special object for spirals.
All of these objects are directly manipulable in interesting ways. Even more control can be gotten from sets of buttons and parameters in button bars.
On the negative side, all this control makes for lots of clutter. There are also some annoying things that happen that squeak avoids. For example pulling prototype objects out of a parts bin when you want them beats having a modal cursor that generates a new one at each click.
Anyway, I highly recommend some play with inkscape's objects for inspirations as to what morphic could and should do in the future.
Inkscape is downloadable and works on all three platforms. (Mac, Windows, Linux). I have been playing with it on a ubuntu 8.04 system.
http://www.google.com/search?q=inkscape&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&a...
Yours in curiosity and service, --Jerome Peace
On Friday 28 Aug 2009 3:47:47 am Jerome Peace wrote:
The thing people who play with morphic will find interesting are the basic objects that inkscape supports and the way they use handles to support the various features. Compare our rectangles, ellipses and stars to theirs. Notice that they also have ways to manipulate paths and add a special object for spirals.
Inkscape is essentially a shape algebra tool with art elements as basic units (point, line, color, space) and artistic principles built into tools (add, subtract, balance, value, proportion) etc. The part I like about it is that it blends both analytical (spin controls for x, y, width, height) and gestaltic (tools in the left panel) approaches very well.
It is useful for higher age groups (i.e. those who are ready to learn of permutations and combinations, say 12+).
What it lacks is support for constraints (e.g. line x should be perpendicular to y). Metapost (program) and MPLib (library) handle this very well. A MPLib plugin would be ideal to stretch Squeaks for higher age groups.
Subbu
On 2009-08-28 08:23, K. K. Subramaniam wrote:
On Friday 28 Aug 2009 3:47:47 am Jerome Peace wrote:
The thing people who play with morphic will find interesting are the basic objects that inkscape supports and the way they use handles to support the various features. Compare our rectangles, ellipses and stars to theirs. Notice that they also have ways to manipulate paths and add a special object for spirals.
Inkscape is essentially a shape algebra tool with art elements as basic units (point, line, color, space) and artistic principles built into tools (add, subtract, balance, value, proportion) etc. The part I like about it is that it blends both analytical (spin controls for x, y, width, height) and gestaltic (tools in the left panel) approaches very well.
It is useful for higher age groups (i.e. those who are ready to learn of permutations and combinations, say 12+).
What it lacks is support for constraints (e.g. line x should be perpendicular to y). Metapost (program) and MPLib (library) handle this very well. A MPLib plugin would be ideal to stretch Squeaks for higher age groups.
That would be DrGeoII in Squeak.
Karl
On Friday 28 Aug 2009 8:42:51 pm Karl Ramberg wrote:
On 2009-08-28 08:23, K. K. Subramaniam wrote:
What it lacks is support for constraints (e.g. line x should be perpendicular to y). Metapost (program) and MPLib (library) handle this very well. A MPLib plugin would be ideal to stretch Squeaks for higher age groups.
That would be DrGeoII in Squeak.
I had a different idea in mind. Instead of building geometric frameworks on top of morphs, we could treat Morph as a box glyph associated with a shape definition (bitmap, graphemes, emoticons, svg element, LaTeX code, postscript, metapost ...). A "edit" message (shift-click) to a morph will invoke a class- specific editor to edit the definition. drawOn: would interpret this definition to render the glyph to a bitmap and cache it. The cache will be invalidated when definition is edited.
Subbu
--- On Fri, 8/28/09, K. K. Subramaniam subbukk@gmail.com wrote:
From: K. K. Subramaniam subbukk@gmail.com Subject: Re: [etoys-dev] Inkscape envy To: etoys-dev@squeakland.org Cc: "Jerome Peace" peace_the_dreamer@yahoo.com Date: Friday, August 28, 2009, 2:23 AM On Friday 28 Aug 2009 3:47:47 am Jerome Peace wrote:
The thing people who play with morphic will find
interesting are the basic
objects that inkscape supports and the way they use
handles to support the
various features. Compare our rectangles, ellipses and
stars to theirs.
Notice that they also have ways to manipulate paths
and add a special
object for spirals.
Subbu replied:
Inkscape is essentially a shape algebra tool with art elements as basic units (point, line, color, space) and artistic principles built into tools (add, subtract, balance, value, proportion) etc. The part I like about it is that it blends both analytical (spin controls for x, y, width, height) and gestaltic (tools in the left panel) approaches very well.
It is useful for higher age groups (i.e. those who are ready to learn of permutations and combinations, say 12+).
What it lacks is support for constraints (e.g. line x should be perpendicular to y). Metapost (program) and MPLib (library) handle this very well. A MPLib plugin would be ideal to stretch Squeaks for higher age groups.
Hmmm. My curiosity with Inkscape and Squeak comes from comparing their capabilities. What part of the interface is better in inkscape? Which is better in squeak? How would I (and particularly the child inside me) want to interact with the shapes inside squeak or inside inkscape?
I don't want to think too much about older vs. younger kids. I want to find something that spans the time spectrum. Low threshold, high ceiling was Logo's goal. What would help the child component of squeak capture that?
Inkscape embodies the high ceiling aspect. Amazing things have been done with it from the little I've seen so far. Some of the interface embodies the low threshold. I can generate stars and make amazing mandelas without too much effort. Still some of the things squeak does work better as an interface that what inkscape has chosen. The targeted audience is different as you suggest.
Also the liveliness is different between the two with squeak winning at the moment. Svg rendering is not smooth or fast yet on my current equipment and software. I wonder why that is?
Anyway thank you and Karl for your thoughts. I'm still early in my explorations.
Yours in curiosity and service, --Jerome Peace
etoys-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org
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Jerome Peace -
K. K. Subramaniam -
Karl Ramberg