>And I do not want my original post to be misconstrued.  This is not a call
>for Squeak Central to do this work.  It is for US, the Squeak community to
>stand up and volunteer.  Squeak Central can certainly help by coordinating
>our efforts, but those of us who want certain types of documentation
>should actually undertake to build that type of documentation.  Those of
>us willing to exercise elbow-grease, but who lack know-how, need to make
>that known so others with know-how can collaborate.
>
>It is time to start building a corpus of useful squeak documentation, and
>to make this a substantial collaborative effort by the community, aiding
>rather than hindering the excellent work of the good folks at Disney.  Any
>thoughts how we might best proceed?

I am involved in two efforts:

- I'm working on a Sophomore/Junior-level undergraduate textbook using
Squeak.  I'm working with a publisher and hope to have a contract within a
month.  The plan is for part of the book to be a gentle intro to Squeak,
and the rest to be a collection of example projects in collaborative
multimedia: Design, implementation, and evaluation of things like the
Swiki, Lex Spoon's MuSwiki, Aibek Musaev's Multimedia Authoring Tool, etc.
The cases and supporting material would all be posted on the Web. The book
itself would be out probably late 2000.  If you're interested in helping to
review this book (draft this Fall), please do let me know -- your help
would be appreciated!

- Kim Rose of the Disney Squeak Team and I want to co-edit a book on Squeak
and the Squeak community.  We're still working out our plans, but we want
to ask several of y'all to write chapters on what you're doing with Squeak,
and in so doing, to document key elements of Squeak.  Our model is the
"Smalltalk-80: Bits of History, Words of Wisdom" book (hope I didn't
slaughter the title too badly -- I read the book years ago but can't find a
copy today) by Glenn Krasner. We want this book to entirely live on the
Web, as well as being a hardcopy book, and the publisher we're talking with
is okay with that.  If you're particularly interested in doing something on
this project, please feel free to approach us even before we approach you!
:-)

There are several of us who have been corresponding about creating a large
collection of SqueakBooks that demonstrate parts of Squeak, particularly
with a goal toward creating active essays.  I'm hoping to do this for
creating support materials for my textbook.  It's been on my to-do list to
get an UploadSwiki going to support this, but haven't found the time yet.

FYI - Working on SqueakBooks as demonstrations, I created a modified form
of the EventRecorder that works within a book.  The problem that I see with
the current EventRecorder is that all recorded events work in absolute
points.  If the recorder's screen isn't just like that of the player's,
then the playback won't be the same.  The idea of the BookEventRecorder is
to make all events relative to the upper left hand corner of the book, so
that everything plays back within the more-controlled space of the book.
If you're interested, this code is at
http://guzdial.cc.gatech.edu/st/BookRecorder.cs

Mark

--------------------------
Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing : Atlanta, GA 30332-0280
(404) 894-5618 : Fax (404) 894-0673 : guzdial at cc.gatech.edu
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html