Harvesting Process is not working

Andreas Raab andreas.raab at gmx.de
Wed Nov 5 07:03:53 UTC 2003


[Running on a huge backlog of Squeak mail]

<cg at tric.nl> wrote:
> Marcus, this is a jewel of circular reasoning:
> 
> "Let's make Squeak modular and distribute less in the base image"
> "Yeah, cool!"

Uhm ... I don't recall Marcus saying that actually. So from that POV your
argumentation is definitely a stretch.

> "Hey, here is SqueakMap where you can register anything that doesn't
>  land in the base image"
> "Great" (200-or-so packages get registered)
> "Here is Squeak 3.6 - less of the same, just as we promised"

Yes and no. There _is_ something to be said about marketing and first
impressions. It may well be that the primary objective of Squeak 3.6 (and
3.7 and 3.8) is to be "less of the same" but it doesn't mean that the user
visible _impression_ has to be the same. To be blunt, what we got in 3.6 are
some interesting new bits and pieces of technology (TTF and SqueakMap for
example) but none of this has any impact on the user. From the first
impression, 3.6 looks precisely the same as 3.5 did. As 3.4 did. As 3.3 did.
As 3.2 did.

And so, saying that

> "Squeak is dead"

is an impression that a user who doesn't see all that technology behind the
curtain (which isn't exposed to him in any way whatsoever) can easily get
to.

The point being, of course, that people have to have a way of _recognizing_
the differences and it isn't that hard to imagine how to present that. For
example, in 3.6 we would have had the ability to show off these pieces of
technology by, for example, having Diego's look enhancements (which use the
TTF stuff) in there and active (if you don't like them, cover them by a
preference which you can turn off) and by having the Squeakmap loader wide
open to show people how much stuff is available on Squeakmap. I'm sure that
there are other places in which these bits and pieces can be show-cased and
we really need to do this. A few sentences in the Welcome window (no matter
how well phrased) just don't cut it.

And no, I don't think that the harvesting process (which I have quite
dedicated opinions about; some good some bad) is related to this but then
again, if we talk about people looking at Squeak it's the first impression
that matters. Given that we have a huge amount of technology inside Squeak,
given that we have even more on SqueakMap it becomes increasingly important
for us to provide something that people can hold onto, that they can use to
distinguish between (say) Squeak 3.6 and Squeak 3.7. Even if it is only the
arrangement of Windows or morphs on the welcome screen (which hasn't changed
since 3.2 either I think) it is important that when you start Squeak there
is something that tells "oh, that's the new version - there's got to be some
cool new stuff in here" instead of "oh, looks like the last version -
probably nothing new in here".

Cheers,
  - Andreas




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