Dan,



You said:

If you have other features that you feel should be included at this time,
please send me a message.  I will try to assemble a beta release about a
week before the target date of issue.

What about Flash?  There was a tantalizing hint in your msg before OOPSLA
(which I missed again; sigh...) but nothing in your msg about the next
release.  Or is that technology related to "Andreas Raab's
as-yet-to-be-named resolution-independent outline-based anti-aliasing 2-D
rendering engine"?  I dearly hope so.  It would be wonderful to get that
technology into Squeak.



Story for the uninitiated:

====================

Once upon a time, in the earliest days of the Mac, there was a company
called Silicon Beach Software from San Diego (get it?), founded by Charlie
Jackson.  They produced a really cool bitmap drawing program, SuperPaint.
I bought a copy from Charlie at his booth (a cardtable) at the Dallas
MacWorld Expo, where he appeared in his trademark Hawaiian-print shirt.
Silicon Beach Software was successful and was eventually bought by Aldus
(creators of Pagemaker), which was in turn bought by Adobe.  SuperPaint,
long in the tooth, was forgotten.



Charlie apparently used some of his money from the sale of SBS to found a
new company, FutureWave Software (was this guy a surfer dude?), which
created a new, really cool vector-based drawing tool, SmartSketch.  I
bumped into him again at his booth (better cardtable now) at the '91
(approximately; probably later) MacWorld Expo in SF.  This new tool had two
key features:

1. It used an innovative graph-theoretic data structure to represent the
drawing elements.  Thus, you could draw three strokes on the screen, which
happened to intersect forming an inner triangle.  The data structure would
record all these intersections, segments, etc., so you could drop paint in
the middle and it would flow to fill just the triangle.  And since this was
a vector-based representation, it was very compact and could be rotated,
magnified, stretched, etc., without loss of detail.  There was a whitepaper
on the FutureWave website that described this "third generation" drawing
tool and data structure, but the website is long gone (see below).

2. With this data structure, you could have the ease-of-use of a bitmap
drawing program and the power of a vector-based program.  I saw Charlie
demoing the program to a couple 10-year old kids.  He'd do a freehand
shape; pick up part of the curve and drag it to change its shape (without
any Bezier curve control points and handles like Illustrator).  I asked him
how you added a "corner" (i.e., hinge point).  He said "Simple", took the
erasure and rubbed out a section of the curve, took the pencil and drew in
a cusp.  When he picked up the curve on one side and pulled it out, the
corner behaved like a hinge point!



Even though they wrote SmartSketch in MFC (another story there) and
introduced it on the PC first :-) I was blown away.  I plunked down my
money and walked away with a copy.



Since the representation was so compact and resolution independent, it soon
became obvious that the technology was great for doing key-frame animation.
FutureWave did an animation authoring tool based on SmartSketch.  And it
was ideal for web-based content -- small, quick to download, really high
quality animations.



About this time, Macromedia was trying to adapt their Director technology
to the web.  But the bitmap-based Director movies were incredibly bloated
and problematic even for CD-ROM access, much less over a modem.  They
produced a "compiler" (Shockwave) to compress the movies; but that was only
a partial solution.  So they bought FutureWave (Jan. '97, press release at
http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia/proom/pr/1997/flashacq.html) and
reintroduced the technology as "Flash" (now at version 3).  Of course,
Macromedia treated the "Flash" data structure as proprietary, to be
protected at all costs.



More recently, in the Internet/Web standards wars, Macromedia has decided
to make the Flash format an "open standard" (Apr. '98, press release and
pointers to the spec and sample code at:
http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia/proom/pr/1998/flashstandard.html),
where it will compete with an Adobe-sponsored XML/PostScript-based entry
for mindshare.  I presume it was this opening up of the format that made it
possible for the Disney Squeak team to consider it.



The press release on the FutureWave acquisition by Macromedia says it was a
"stock-for-stock merger", i.e., no cash.  I hope Charlie sold his
Macromedia shares (didn't they take a dive in mid-'97?) and is enjoying a
beach somewhere.

====================



So now you know where Flash came from (if you ever wanted to know :-) and a
little bit about why I'm excited to see the technology appear in Squeak.



What's the news, Dan?



Mike Wirth

<usual disclaimers>