Hello Squeakers

goran.krampe at bluefish.se goran.krampe at bluefish.se
Tue Mar 23 08:34:14 UTC 2004


Hi Steven and all!

Steven Riggins <mailinglists at geeksrus.com> wrote:
> 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.

Sounds great! "native widgets" has been a lacking area for a long time
and probably one of the few hurdles left for many potential Squeakers.

> 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.

Very good.

> 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.

I am interested and so are probably many more. But tons of questions pop
up of course. :)
Let me just hit you with a few:

- Have you thought about how to "run" this project? You know, the
"process" of it all. Do you intend to build it all "yourself" and then
turn it "free" or would you like to build it cooperatively with the
community? There is no "wrong" answer - just curious. Different models
have different characteristica.

- Have you thought about the "tech" side of it? It sounds like you would
like to have a Squeak-side abstraction layer and then have different
"backends" with one being Morphic itself and the others typically being
native kits. Read about the philosophy of SWT? (kinda interesting IMHO)

Some other noteworthy things in this area:

- An article on StableSqueak (now a dead project) that includes some
XML-based UIBuilder facade stuff unifying MVC and Morphic tools:
http://anakin.bluefish.se/sqworld

- My first stumbling steps (my C is very rusty) in building a Gtk plugin
for Squeak: http://anakin.bluefish.se/gohu/25

> Sincerely,
> 
> Steve

It would be delightful to see some real progress in this area IMHO. I am
all ears.

regards, Göran



More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list