Hello all,

While Alan's response does help me to understand a great, I would still
love to know if anyone uses the universal tile system, in what ways , and
to what end.

While I understand that Universal tiles were a false start on
the road to an intermediate visual programming/scripting system, I would
like to know if anyone has found it useful to their work...if anyone could
recommend it as a tool worth a serious try. I am especially curious given
that new visual tools are rumored to be on the horizon.

I would also would like to hear  more about the tile scriptor which I
happened upon when fiddling with messages in the system browser. What is
the tile scriptor and how can I use it. I am having fantasies of being
able to drag and drop tiles representing instances of classes and
message calls straight from the system browser, building full-fledged
applications with tiles. While I doubt that is true, I would still like to
know what purpose the tile scriptor serves.

I was attracted to Squeak because of its direct manipulation,
visual programming/scrpting, and multimedia potential, after all the main
thrust of my work has to do with the democratization of media production,
the means of media production, and the means of media tool production.
Over the couple of years I have been using Squeak, I have become convinced
that it is just such a democratic platform; now, I was hoping to learn to
use it as such.

Thanks,

John


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2003 14:26:39 -0800
From: Alan Kay <Alan.Kay at squeakland.org>
Reply-To: squeakland at squeakland.org
To: squeakland at squeakland.org
Subject: Re: I want to document...slightly off topic

Hi John --

Again, this is really a squeak.org question, since squeakland.org is
*only* about the etoys part of squeak. The short answer is the
universal tiles were one of several experiments we did to investigate
making an enduser scripting system of much wider scope than etoys.
Some of it worked very well, but we judged the gestalt to be below
threshold.

Cheers,

Alan

-----

At 5:13 PM -0500 3/11/03, John Voiklis wrote:
>Hello Everyone,
>
>This series of questions, and especially the reference to the
>as  yet unrealized intermediate visual programming/scripting environment,
>reminds me of a question that went unanswered a few weeks ago.
>
>What are the universal tiles? Do they have anything to do with the
>intermediate interface that was mentioned? I have played ever so
>slightly with universal tiles; they remind me a bit of the tile scriptor
>that I discovered accidentally when working in the system browser, but
>otherwise I have not seen any substantive difference between regular and
>universal tiles. I am very likely missing something.
>
>Who uses universal tiles and why; or, to put a different spin on it, who
>should use universal tiles and for what purposes? Finally, since I
>mentioned it, what is the tile scriptor...could I do full-fledged
>Squeak/Smalltalk programming using a tile interface...how (this last
>extended question may be more appropriate to another list)?
>
>I know that to ask these questions means, to a certain extent, that
>universal tiles are not for me. Then again, I had similar questions about
>Squeak itself three years ago.
>
>Thanks,
>
>John


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