I'm a beginner who has never used Squeak. Please Help.

Alan Kay Alan.Kay at squeakland.org
Thu Oct 18 15:13:24 UTC 2001


Folks --

There is quite a bit more to look at in the tutorial (and still quite 
a bit more to do on it).

So far the project itself took less than 3 hours (of which more than 
2 were spent playing around with the animated character). Included in 
this were two ways for doing "eyes following the mouse" (one for kids 
and one for older kids), and two ways to do "continent and country 
link following".

The documentation has so far taken about 25-30 hours (sigh!). The 
swikis are nice and convenient, but I reckon they are about 4 times 
less efficient than documenting in Squeak directly. (There are so 
many separate preparations and uploading of images plus the lack of 
WYSIWYG editing, etc.) But it is an interesting exercise ....

Parts of *Etoy Basics* and all of "continent zooming" still need to 
be finished (maybe later today). Then there are a few (simpler) 
sections on how to start up various media players in Squeak: MP3, 
MPEG, MIDI, etc....

A GeeMail to swiki page converter would be pretty helpful here (if it 
remains a good idea to show some of the documentation in simple web 
formats).  Bijan has mumbled about this from time to time ....
     I do plan to make a complete Squeak version of this tutorial 
after getting this version more or less done. (In the past, I have 
done documentation in Squeak, intending to later make an html 
version, but even in Squeak I find the documentation writing and 
decision making exhausting, and thus never got around to html. At 
least this way the html stuff is getting done.....)

Thanks again to Tamika for being willing to ask the initial questions!

Again, please help me to avoid annoying race conditions by holding 
off editing and annotating this tutorial until I'm safely on the 
plane to Japan on late Friday.

http://www.squeakland.org:8080/super/200

Cheers,

Alan
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