Ralph Johnson <johnson at cs.uiuc.edu> said:

>I would like to see some good documentation on book morphs and the like.
>Several times I decided to take an afternoon off and figure them out, 
>and have not succeeded yet.  It is SO much easier to learn this kind of
>stuff if you can see demos and have someone explain it to you.  Writing
>documentation that can stand on its own is a lot of work.  I think
>everybody is underestimating it.

I'm glad that I found Squeak and this list. There are a LOT of ideas
floating around in my ruined brain [homage to Fabulous Furry Freak
Brothers] that Squeak and the Squeak community seem ideal for.

In response to the documentation issue, I'd like to point out that you guys
are NOT thinking about using Squeak to its full capacity in this regard, as
far as I can tell. You're talking about static tutorials when you should be
talking about multi-media animated ones.

A good example of what I am talking about is the old "Macintosh Development
Fundamentals" tutorial produced by the now-defunct Apple Developer
University. It was an animated HyperCard stack made with an early version
of Macromedia Director. It used simple B&W line art, combined with
narration, to talk a beginning Mac developer through the concepts of Mac
programming and the steps to produce a sample app. It was possibly the best
example of multi-media-based training that I have seen.

Squeak's current capabilities, for the most part, go WAAAY beyond those of
the version of Director used for that Mac programming tutorial. While
e-paper documentation is important, why stop there? Why not devise a
simple-to-use set of classes to implement a "baby" Director that can be
used to walk a student through the fundamentals of SmallTalk, Squeak, and
the various high-level functionality (e.g., Morphic, the baby Director
itself, etc) that are available/being created for Squeak?



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I use Cyberdog.
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