Henrik --

>Alan Kay>>  Most of the next billion machines are not going to be 
>either Macs or PCs
>>>   ..... but will certainly be connected to Internet.
>
>I also hope that convergence/ubiquitous computing etc. really will happen,
>and throw everything over as the personal computers did--but I see many
>reasons why this won't happen; too many I think.

I wasn't thinking of convergence, except as below ...

>At least not for a long
>time--the PDAs and friends are still not nearly useful enough, for example.
>What timeframe do you expect this to happen in? A billion computers implies
>a rather long time.

Not really. Many of the next generation of mobile phones will have 
StrongARM or equivalent chips, reasonable displays, and will be 
connectable to the net. Settop boxes, PDAs, etc. This is all going to 
happen in a rush, in the next few years. What convergence there is 
will exist at the phone and TCP/IP levels (and, of course, there is 
Squeak that can run on all)...

>
>>  Well, Squeak is a client for its own media -- and this is what I'm
>>  most interested in -- you may have noticed that we can now "publish"
>>  whole projects, which can serve as a more active and media basis for
>>  representing ideas than simplistic html pages. We will release a
>>  bunch of these by the end of the summer.
>
>Given these ambitions, I am surprised that there appear to be no ambitions
>to addressing the usability of the stuff inside Squeak, and make it
>accessible for 'real people', as in accessible to those without a major in
>Smalltalk.

"Appearences can be deceiving". The route we are taking may seem odd, 
but there are reasons (many of them rational) for taking a more 
hacker's route, not the least is that we need serious wide & deep 
functionality to hang our eventual UIs on (I think many people on the 
list realize that the present UI (er, UIs) is just a placeholder for 
a near future more uniform and richer scheme for the "omniuser").

Cheers,

Alan