THE SEPTEMBER ISSUE OF THE SQUEAK NEWS IS OUT NOW!

Volume 1, Issue 3. 15 September 2001

Squeak for A Better World!

In this issue:

Squeak for a Better World!
We changed our theme to "Squeak for a Better World" after the tragic events
of Tuesday September 11th. Let us help make the world a better place for
us all to live!
There is a lot in Squeak News this month. Close to the end of this month is
the 5th anniversary of the day Squeak was placed on the Internet for the
rest of the world to enjoy. We e-talked with Dan Ingalls about this most
important event.
Focus on Multimedia
The focus of this issue is Squeak and Multimedia and we have a significant
amount of content about the subject. We feature two interactive demos:
.    Squeak Cinema: A demo of the Squeak MPEG player, and
.    SqueakAmp: The Squeak MP3 player.
In addition John McIntosh explains the MPEG player of Squeak, Mark
Guzdial lets us to include the full set of the active essays on studying
computer music with an introduction, Juan Manuel Vuletich talks about
his PhotoSqueak. Karl Ramberg's contribution is a short active essay
about Art and Computers. Our beginners series focus is objects,
messages and beyond. The SqueakNOS team talks about  system level
programming in Squeak in the article "The SqueakNOS keyboard". We also
solicited an article from the developers of the Squeak GemStone connectivity
software and we are happy to feature this article about GemSqueak.

Squeak Related News

This month's news includes an e-view with Dan Ingalls and summaries
     of the activity of the Squeak list

Squeak's 5th Birthday! An e-view with Dan Ingalls
    It seems that 25th September 1996 was the day Squeak was
    unleashed to us mortals (incidentally after about 9 months of
    incubation)! We declared this day to be Squeak's "birth" day.
    We asked Dan about that time, Today and the 10th birthday,
    and Dan answered!

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 is being emailed to our email
    subscribers as well as posted on the on the web on the SqueakNews
    site at:
    http://www.squeaknews.com/digest/index.html.

The World of Squeak: Objects, Messages and Beyond by Tansel Ersavas
     This article is the second 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 explains the basic concepts of Squeak such as
    objects, messages and relationships between objects.

Active Essay for Studying Computer Music by Mark Guzdial
    If Mark Guzdial isn't an institution, he should be made into one.
    Author/instigator/editor of the two current Squeak books, hacker
    of PWS & the original Swiki, hoster of Swikis, teacher of Squeak...
    he, his students, and his classes are always throwing out cool stuff
    for the rest of us. For his class on "Computer Music Implementation",
    he wrote a series of active essays, which cover everything from the
    built in Squeak sound tools to MIDI. Aside from being nicely
    written/constructed on interesting topics -- i.e., an enjoyable read --
    they are great examples of active essays. Mark was kind enough to
    let us feature the entire series with a bonus introduction that puts
    these great active essays in perspective.

MPEG: Finding a Fit by John McIntosh
    Among all these activities that keeps us all informed about what is
    going on around the world, John found the time to write about that
    magical plug-in that enables us to play highly compressed video
    and from within the comforts of Squeak. Learn all about it.

Squeak Cinema
    A showcase of the MPEG player and some of Squeak's presentation
    abilities. Get ready to be blown away!

SqueakAmp: Squeak's MP3 player
    A demonstration of the MP3 playback ability of Squeak using the
    MPEG plug-in that is written by Bob Hartwig.

Art, Computers by Karl Ramberg
    Karl tosses questions about Art and Computers and starts experimenting
    in this short and sweet active essay...

GemSqueak: A Full Functional GemStone Client for Squeak by Valeria
         Murgia with collaboration of Leandro Caniglia
    As the name implies GemSqueak is a full functional GemStone client
    for Squeak. In this article Valeria explains what is GemSqueak and
    the need for GemSqueak, refactorings and enhancements made,
    browsing, inspecting and debugging GemStone objects and
    possible future enhancements

The Squeak Keyboard: An Introduction to Low Level Programming in
SqueakNOS: by the SqueakNOS team
    This article explains how Squeak handles keyboard programming from
    within SqueakNOS. Don't try this code at home! It will only work within
    SqueakNOS but will show you a lot can be done in Squeak once you
    are closer to the bare metal!

The Conclusion of our In-depth Interview with John Maloney
    In the conclusion of this in-depth interview, we talked with John about
    Morphic, how it differed from the original Self Morphic, and what is in
    future for Morphic. We also talked about the Disney days, some
    projects that John got involved during Disney and more...

A Minimal Multimedia Manager for PDAs and Kiosks by Tansel Ersavas
    In this article Tansel discusses a very minimal multimedia manager that
    can be used in PDAs and Kiosks with minimal hardware.

Juggle with Squeak by Tansel Ersavas
    In this part of the series Tansel beautifies the Juggling Scene and
    explains how to create a simple user interface for the Juggling demo.

Squeak quiz with surprise rewards
    Every month, we have a question that addresses a specific problem
    and collect all answers. We will then declare one as the "editor's
    choice". The person who sent the selected solution will receive a
    reward from us.

And more ...

Enjoy Squeak News!

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