Hi Chris,

--- Christian Langreiter <c.langreiter at tirol.com>
wrote:
> Mark -
> 
> I know Director fairly well and I agree with you on
> most points (but I can't
> support your impression that D is slower than Squeak
> - at least when it comes
> to the important things - e.g. visualization of
> small sprites).

I prefer to let objects paint directly while drawing
frames (channels...ugh...). Making a subclass of
ImageMorph which holds a FormCanvas as it's image,
i've now got a CanvasMorph to paint graphics ports to,
while retaining the Morphic support - it's as fast as
anything Director would draw, easier, plus it's done
in Smalltalk thank goodness. 

> Maybe we should think a bit about what would be
> needed to make Squeak-based
> multimedia products possible, what would be the
> issues with installing software
> on customer's computers (distribution issues), how
> to efficiently build up
> projects, how to improve the animation capabilities
> (perhaps a timeline for
> PasteUpMorphs or even every single morph wouldn't be
> such a bad idea ...
> combined with flexible paths associable to every
> moprh ... Huh!)

I've also been a long time user of Director, and
Squeak is the answer to many a multimedia developers
dream. I don't mean to turn the Squeak mailing list
into a Director grudge fest, but i've often thought
that Director may have been a student competition, not
the work of very visionary programmers ;p. Do you
remeber when D7 came out, with "new" vector support?
Some support - only one vector shape per member, no
scaling or rotation while editing, no "advanced" lingo
support for managing the shape or returning points
(ala valueAt: of Bezier2Segment, or containsPoint: of
CurvedPolygon or Spline). Yet, take the CurvedPolygon
class of Squeak - the perfect object for defining and
calculating regions in a game map, or complex hot-spot
rollover instance. I've always wanted sprites to be
able to follow dynamic paths calculated and adjusted
on the fly, but the only way was to write your own
path class, and work with that. I'm currently creating
a BSpline class, and a time-based animator which i
plan to post for Morphic users very soon. This would
have some editor views to create and manage objects.

> The framework is already present to a certain extent
> in Squeak, but Macromedia
> won't have to be worried for a long period of time
> (Flash is more important
> than Director nowadays, anyway - and Squeak won't
> ever beat this one in terms
> of size [250k] and speed).

Squeak is a much better way to do multimedia, and
adding the Flash support has moved Squeak even closer
to the established multimedia world. The great thing
is that any programmer in the Squeak community can
bring just about any format to this environment by
learning the file format spec (try
http://www.wotsit.org) while remaining in that same
programming evironment. I think as a standard,
Director has a limited future, as all the advanced
Director developers i know honestly pet hate it, and
have all moved onto something better (sometimes Java,
in my case Squeak). I can see that the Squeak team has
concentrated so much on the real smarts of Squeak, and
now finally (at a mighty version 2.x), the interface
is starting to grow (i've noticed the scrollbars and
views enhancing over the last few updates...groovy).
If this is Squeak at version 2.x, i don't think it's
that Macromedia should worry, more so that the
developer community can breath a sigh of relief, and
let the creatives go to town (as they should).

Cheers,
Ali.
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