[warning: I'm about to talk in a positive manner about a piece of Java
software ;-)]

A few years ago, I played around with a package called 'Struck' by Gerald de
Jong, who introduced me to it over some geek dinner. I can chat very long
about it, but just go to http://www.beautifulcode.nl/struck with a
Java-enabled browser and have some fun (it helps if you're a trained 'magic
eye' magician, by the way). If you download the software, you'll have a whole
slew of models to play withi - fishy and bird in the animals directory are
especially recommended. 

What it basically does is that it lets you connect points with springs
that have various properties; the resulting tension in the model will
automatically animate your object (with e.g. a spring with oscillating
strength driving a whole 3D model in an extremely fluid way). It's based
on Buckminster Fuller's Tensegrity ideas.

It, err, struck me that this would be a great thing to have
in Squeak. It's fun, it's interactive, and it'd really be nice to
have Morphs connected by springs flying around your desktop (topics
connected by springs and then flattened into 2D space have been used as
a visualisation tool), or Alice elements doing the same. 

Anyway, this whole graphics stuff is over my head, so even if I wanted to or
had the time, I probably couldn't build it; but as I remembered it (the
association was triggered by an animation of DNA models flying around on a
Discovery documentary on bioterrorism, go figure) and it seems to be a
little-known thing, I thought I mentioned it. 

-- 
Cees de Groot               http://www.cdegroot.com     <cg at cdegroot.com>
GnuPG 1024D/E0989E8B 0016 F679 F38D 5946 4ECD  1986 F303 937F E098 9E8B