Hi Andreas,
Guess that they are in a really early stage, and want to get some more things settled before going public.
Well you got a peek at work that is going on *right now* (literally) at the OLPC offices.
:-)
But I wonder, what kinds of projects and tutorials will be on, and if there will be any localization efforts for e.g. Nigeria or if English is ok there.
The way I understand it, all of it needs to be localized for the deployment. However, we expect to work with native speakers for that.
I also wonder about the the future of Etoys for the 2Be1 - will the next processors be fast enough to support Tweak - or will Tweak be tweaked to support the current one?
Our immediate goal is to make eToys run well on the current hardware generation and that's looking good so far. We decided to go with the "old" eToys version just because that meant we could concentrate on dealing with those aspects that are specific to the hardware and software platform - i.e., optimizing a few things, making a nice integration with the sugar framework, providing more examples and documentation.
Or will VP continue to enhance and tidy Etoys1? Tin Lizzie seems the way to go....when can we start to play with Tin Lizzie?
As soon as I find a bit of time to tidy up a release ;-)
Great news, looking forward to it.
Are we in "competition mode" -- are there signs that the python (Ruby?) communities come up with a decent system to substitute the Squeak-Etoys version?
I wouldn't call it "competition" - we try to encourage more educational content and other languages only add to our vision and aren't in conflict with it.
Yeah, right, with the open document format in place it should be quite transparent with which language/env the etoys are created.
Did anyone of you consider not to store the docs/specs of Etoys statically, but the commands to recreate the docs? I am imagining sth like "Create standard playfield at 100@100 called SolarSystem / Change color of SolarSystem to black/ Drop standard ellipse into SolarSystem called sun/... and so on. Sth. like a human readable prevayler. http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/wa-objprev/
Having a decent editor for this high level changesets (to eliminate all the bad trials) could create tutorials, etc out of it too. I think that Ted worked in that direction already.
The main question are: Can we help? How?
There is always a bunch of issues that we could use help with. For example, if you know someone who could work out Thai and Arabic script setting in Squeak that would be quite helpful. Alternatively, finding some time to work out a Pango integration with Squeak would help (since we could leverage the work done by OLPC for the languages that we don't support). Oh, and making Squeak IPv6 ready would be helpful, too (looks like OLPC will use IPv6). Also, it looks like OLPC will support CSound and we don't have support for that either (but it'd be great if we could just use the existing MIDI interface for it, etc).
According to http://www.csounds.com/manual/html/OSCNetwork.html (what's in a name...;-) csound comes with osc, and I happen to have written an osc-client and server for squeak found on Squeakmap, maybe this could be of some help to you? http://map.squeak.org/package/61f807be-83a3-4944-bfa1-686ddac7153c
Other than that, I think we have our bases covered so far. There is a bunch of VM stuff needed (Ian is working on that), Sugar integration (Bert is doing that) and a ton of UI fixes and tweaks (Yoshiki, Takashi, and Scott are working on that). We're also trying to work out some nicer tutorials (Takashi and Ted) and trying to get tutorials and documentation in order (Kim and Alan). I'm sure everybody could need some help here or there but unfortunately we're working on tight schedules (there is an october deadline looming over us which is the immediate goal to which at least the initial integration and VM parts need to be done).
p.s. I forgot to mention and to thank Takashi Yamamiya San, who is helping Yoshiki and Co. with the Etoys Part.
You also forgot to mention Scott and Ted, and Takashi is doing a lot more than just "helping" with eToys ;-)
Guess so. Thanks to Scott and Ted goes without saying... without those great guys no Etoys would have ever made it...:-)
Thanks Andreas!
Cheers,
Markus