Dear all,

I have been experimenting with Squeak on and off for a while now and I have 
enjoyed 
my experience with it very much. I would now like to begin using it more 
extensively 
and I would also very much like to contribute to the project if I am able. 
I thought that it 
might help to share some of my thoughts on beginning to use Squeak and I 
hoped that 
you might help me with some questions that I have. I have been unable to 
find answers to 
the questions in the documentation that I could find, however, if they are 
answered 
elsewhere I apologise.

I am most familiar with working in a UNIX environment so that is colouring 
my relation 
to Squeak. While I feel like I have a grasp of the Smalltalk programming 
language and 
programming environment I think that I am not really grasping some of how 
to use 
Squeak as a user environment, particularly the image. By "user environment" 
I mean the 
environment I use to perform tasks using a computer, such as writing documentation,
 
browsing the web, reading and writing email, drawing pictures, etc. At the 
level of 
program usage and program interaction I am used to thinking in terms of 
data files and 
programs that operate on data files. Before discovering Smalltalk I had 
done object 
oriented programming in Java and C++. However, when using these languages 
I still built 
programs that operated on data files. I am not used to working in a system 
which is object 
oriented on all scales.

I thought that the above might help to give some context to my questions.

1. How should I distribute data between inside the image and on the host 
filing system?

For example, if I want to write a photo album browser Morph for viewing 
my digital 
photos in Squeak. Do I store the photos primarily on the host filing system 
or do I file 
them all into my Squeak image? Filing all the photos in will make the image 
very large 
but is this normal and should I rely on virtual memory to swap data between 
RAM and 
the hard disk?

2. How should I organize instances of objects within the image?

I understand that I can have variables local to a Workspace and that instances 
of Morphs 
are accessible through their GUI but how do I access an instance of an object 
across 
multiple Workspaces or Projects? For example if I want to store notes that 
I am taking as 
I work with Squeak in UNIX I might do

$ vi ~/notebook

and if I want to search the file for a note that I took on creating Morphs 
I might do

$ grep 'Morph' ~/notebook

I thought about creating a global (in the Smalltalk SystemDictionary) Dictionary 
called 
#Home and storing references to them there

Home _ Dictionary new.
Home at: #notebook put: Workspace new.

The Squeak equivalents to the above UNIX commands that I came up with are

"vi ~/notebook"

(Home at: #notebook) openLabel: 'notebook'.

"cat ~/notebook"

((Home at: #notebook) contents string) linesDo: [:line | Transcript show: 
line ; cr].

"grep Morph ~/notebook"

((Home at: #notebook) contents string)
linesDo: [:line | ('*Morph*' match: line) ifTrue: [Transcript show: line 
; cr]].

All I have done with the above is to transfer a UNIX way of working into 
Squeak so I 
was wondering what would be a more Smalltalk approach to the above tasks?

If there is no document existing that addresses these issues I would be 
very happy to 
volunteer to start one. I could write my experiences up as "An introduction 
to Squeak for 
UNIX users" or something similar that could outline how common practices 
in UNIX 
translate into the Squeak environment.

Thank you very much for your time,
Simon.

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