Dear Squeakers,

I am pleased to announce that the August issue of SqueakNews e-zine is out now. Subscribers should receive their issues within the next 10 business days. This issue is only available in CD-Rom.

Here is the brief description of the issue:
Squeak News  15 August 2001
Volume 1, Issue 2
ISSN: 1445 5579
Published on CD-Rom

This issue of Squeak News includes the following:

Issue Theme: Squeak for Beginners

How to Approach Squeak: by Tansel Ersavas
This article is the first installment of a series about Squeak that aims to take a person from the beginner stage to the level of a highly sophisticated programmer during the course of this (long) series. In this article, Tansel outlines basic concepts of object oriented approach and Squeak. He emphasizes differences between Squeak and most other languages, explains why it is harder for people who have been exposed to other languages to learn Squeak and suggests strategies that would accelerate the learning process.

An Approach for Teaching and Learning Squeak: by Michael Guenter
Michael brings us the experience of a teacher and proposes an approach for learning and teaching Squeak. He defines different kinds of newbies and discusses best approach for them and elaborates on his "study buddies" idea which has already attracted interest.

News Section:

Monthly digest of the Squeak Mailing list: by Bijan Parsia
Every month Bijan summarizes the Squeak mailing list painstakingly by organizing postings under threads with commentary using home-bred tools that he developed. (and explained some of them in the July issue) If you are busy and can't follow the fast pace of the Squeak list this is the column to read! This section will be emailed to our email subscribers as well as posted on the on the web.

Mean Squeak Machines:
In this article we chase our DynaBook dreams and look at some of the latest systems from super PDAs to desktop units that can run Squeak happily. We also investigate some peripherals that can enhance our Squeak experience from tablet-screens to solid-state USB disk units that are attached to key-rings.

Features:

Control your Submorphs: by Ted Kaehler and   Andreas Raab
In this active article Ted and Andreas take us to a tour of the new layout mechanism of morphs recently introduced to Squeak by Andreas Raab. As nicely stated by Ted: "Why talk about something when you can see it in action", this article will come to life when playing with it very true to the soul of Squeak News.

A Minimal User Interface Toolkit for PDAs and Kiosks: by Tansel Ersavas
In this article Tansel introduces us to a very basic set of tools that help us implement simple user interfaces especially suitable for point and click applications. These applications are more likely to be useful on environments where using Morphic is not feasible such as small PDAs and Kiosk applications that operate on hardware with limited resources and where the input is limited to a touch screen or stylus input.

The second part of an In-depth Interview with John Maloney
In the second part of this in-depth interview, John talks about the Apple days, the birth of Squeak, how Squeak became on open source project, and how his expectations were exceeded with community support. We also discussed with him about the past life of Morphic before Squeak.

Story of a Quake Packet: by the SqueakNOS team
Do you know what these naughty people at the SqueakNOS team do when their workmates go into a frenzy of playing Quake? They peep the network activity using nothing other than their naughtier collaborator Squeak! Read this captivating story of intrigue and deception, and find out all about those Quake packets that lurk at your network pipes while people are playing Quake!

Squeak Tweaks: A Quickie HTML Editor by Bijan Parsia
In this article Bijan has a go at a quickly put together HTML editor which could be the beginning of a HTML editor liberator!

Juggle with Squeak by Tansel Ersavas
In the conclusion of this series Tansel finally puts his act together both about juggling and finishing this tutorial, and the rest of the people can finally juggle !

and more...

By the way we would like to take this opportunity to thank all the people who overwhelmed us with an incredible amount of enthusiasm and praise. We have received quite a lot  of feedback. Only one turned out to be considered not that positive which in turn indicated some of our shortcomings we are in the process of addressing.

Some of the comments extracted from readers' feedback are as follows:

"It looks great..."

"Very impressive design and execution of Squeak News!  Great job!"

"It gave me ideas how to present dynamic content. It convinces me to persue using Squeak for multimedia and CBT applications"

"I *love* it. It's very cute"

"They are awesome! The small ones are very neat..."

"I think the potential is great for a cross-platform ezine tool for clubs. Perhaps this could be the "killer-app" for Squeak/Smalltalk?"

"The first issue was WONDERFUL"

"Yesterday I received the July issue of SqueakNews and spent a very enjoyable afternoon reading it. Great work!"

"PS: the first issue was great!"

"By the way, I found your interview with John Maloney really interesting. Looking forward to part 2, and the guide for squeak beginners. Thanks for making a valuble contribution to the Smalltalk community."

"thank you for this great magazine"

and similar comments.

We also received one feedback that started as: "Fellows, this stuff needs WORK!" and complained about the navigation being difficult and non-intuitive. That made us realize that we are still too Squeak-centric in our approach to user interaction. The first issue went out without a user guide and assumed that people were familiar with basic Squeak navigation ( Squeak News used a modified version of Squeak menu and project navigation mechanisms) and failed to mention that the minimum resolution that SqueakNews was to be viewed was 1024x768. We are addressing these concerns and really looking forward to your feedback to improve Squeak News further.

Our on-line section should be available by November 15th in sync with the November issue and by then Squeak News e-zine will be capable of self-updating behavior (It already has that ability but it is dormant, and there is no server part yet containing the update information).

Many of you in this list presented cool utilities, goodies and enhancements. I invite you to write articles and tutorials about them and send them to us. This way you would have documented your system as well as making your system more accessible to a greater number of people because of the exposure and easier access to these utilities because of the documentation. If you have an idea about an article, tutorial or subject that you think it would be cool to feature please let me know even if you are not in a position to do something about it yourself.

Thanks again for your support and helping us making Squeak News a benchmark for electronic publishing media!

Ps: We have a limited number of the July issue CDs which when ordered could be shipped with the August issue. When they run out there may be a delay in supplying these back issues.

Tansel Ersavas
Editor, Squeak News
http://www.squeaknews.com