Folks -

I thought it might be useful to let you all know about plans for the next release.  I'm shooting for either just before Thanksgiving (nov 23rd), or possibly the week before, if everything is ready.

What will this include?

1.  Well, to begin with, all the updates that are out now, and VMs that support the new primitives (pluggable primitives and weak arrays).

2.  Also the wavelet transform will be included, and a bunch of work Scott Wallace is doing on Scripting and viewers in morphic.

3.  I am talking with Travis Griggs about folding in his numeric coercion improvements.  This is like deja vu for me, since I was the one who put double-dispatching into ST-80 before the version 2 release went out from Xerox waaaaay back then.

4.  Then there will be a first pass at Squeak Pages - an architecture that began with John Malone's WebBook project, and that has been carried through to a first level of completion by Ted Kaehler.  It basically maps a morphic world onto a web page in a manner that lets you build vast amounts of morphic content that can be non-resident so you don't need a huge image, and that can be shared like everything else on the web.  Refinements to properly support active objects in those worlds are in porgress.

5.  Finally is Andreas Raab's as-yet-to-be-named resolution-independent outline-based anti-aliasing 2-D rendering engine (maybe we'll call it "hyphen" ;-).  This is built on primitives with the speed and generality of BitBlt, but with other wonderful properties.  This first release will only provide the primitive functionality, but it will enable many experiments.  It is my hope that we will be able to slide this in under all the existing warpBlt hacks, and end up with a thing of real beauty.  The design is also intended to support nice 3-D...

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.

	- Dan