Hi everyone!

I wanted to introduce myself.  My name is Steve Riggins and I have been 
on this list since last April, reading along, getting drowned in 
information and all that.  I'm still very new to Squeak, as I've been 
working on designing my application for the past 10 months along with 
working on our past product, TK3.

What I am building now is the next generation of TK3, titled TK4.  
While TK3 was super fast and written in C++ for Mac and Windows, the 
code base was difficult to extend and moving to new platforms was 
impossible.

TK4 will be an XML based book creation tool that uses the Squeak 
VM/Runtime/Image as a stand alone application base.  We're going to 
work hard to make this appear like any other Mac/Windows/Linux 
application, in that we want to work with the community to add in 
native OS widgets/Windows/Menus, open dialogs, all that jazz, and have 
our own squeak objects living and communicating in those windows.  Of 
course, it'll work inside one squeak window if no native UI factories 
are found.

As an open source project, I hope to be able to have most of TK4 
reusable by others and really try to bring a off the shelf shipping 
application, and its notoriety to Squeak, et al.

This is no demo or research project, this is the real deal.

If you are curious,  you can find our last attempt at 
http://www.nightkitchen.com/  There is a 30 day trial on the tools and 
the reader is free.

Before working on TK3 (I did the OS X port and some of the main app, 
most was done by outside contractors),  I worked at The Voyager Company 
on CD-ROMs, interactive laserdiscs and also did a 2 year stint at 
Kaleida Labs, working on ScriptX.

I'm excited about living in a runtime bound environment again because I 
plant to build most of TK4 using the same interfaces any third party 
would, such that our objects could potentially live outside of TK4 and 
other objects, say an e-toy, could live inside a TK4 book and work just 
fine.  Maybe we can even have the text flow around a car while it is 
being driven?  Who knows, the sky is the limit right now.

I look forward to all of your comments as we progress and sincerely 
hope I don't drive you insane with my naiveté.

Sincerely,

Steve