Squeak for everyday use??

Aaron J Reichow reic0024 at d.umn.edu
Tue Mar 26 21:57:47 UTC 2002


On Wed, 27 Mar 2002, Mayuresh Kathe wrote:

> 1. Web surfing (not too heavy, mostly googling around)

Scamper is the web browser in Squeak currently.  It is very bare-bones.
Even a small, textmode browser like Links does quite a bit more.
Unforuntately, a lot of sites now a days are very feature heavy- JS, Java,
funky tables and the like.  Luckily, the kinds of things I read on-line
look OK in browsers like Scamper and Dillo, but I imagine I'm a minority
and that respect.

One promising lead is Jon Hyland's MediaView-
http://www.huv.com/smalltalk/browser.html

As time goes by, this lead seems less promising, however.  He's not had
the time to tidy and fileOut the code thus far, and my attempts to contact
him to see if some other arragement could be reached (a third-party doing
the code clean-up, or distributing the old image sans clean-up), but I've
not recieved any responses.

> 2. EMails (lots of them, filtering, PGP would be great ;)
>    [handling around 300 mails a day]

It seems a fair amount of people use Celeste and like it.  No PGP now, but
that could be added.

> 3. Telnet (thats one of the most important things in my life :)
>    [is there SSH available too??] <grin>

There is TelnetMachine, a very primitive telnet client.  Can't handle much
in the way of terminal emulation though, I am guessing running something
like emacs would be out of the question.

On the Squeak IRC channel (#squeak on irc.openprojects.net), someone was
talking about a VT100 emulator on which they were working. I can't recall
his nick, but if you're reading this, please pipe up. :)  IIRC, it had
features enough to run emacs over a telnet connection and display it
decently.  A SSH backend could be added to it, I imagine, although that
hasn't been done yet, AFAIK.

> 4. Document preparation
>    (usually LaTeX, would like some way to view .ps files)

See the "Document Crafting, Objectively" thread in the archive. Lots of
jibberjabbering about this.  No real tools yet, although I'd love
something LaTeX-ish for creating docs for print in Squeak.

> 5. Journal keeping (pure text, almost 8 years of data, need some
>    encryption technique, certainly wouldn't want my to-be wife to
>    read _some_ of those entries ;)

It would be pretty easy to create a journal browser that stored journal
entries in a hierarchical manner.  Doesn't exist yet.

> 6. A bit of music (mostly MP3)

There's an MP3 player in Squeak.

> 7. A bit of drawing (mostly rough concept drawings done while on
>    the move)

There are some painting tools in Squeak, but to my knowledge, nothing for
vector drawing yet.

> 8. PIM (Schedules, AddressBook)

There's a class PDA.  As a part of my Dynapad PDA Environment, I plan on
creating a nicer set of PIM tools.  Eventually at http://spe.sf.net.

Regards,
Aaron

  Aaron Reichow  ::  UMD ACM Pres  ::  http://www.d.umn.edu/~reic0024/
  "life, probably the biggest word i've ever said, that says a lot,
  because there's a whole lot of words inside my head.." :: atmosphere





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