Hi All,

The Morphic Team is Cees De Groot, Edgar De Cleene and me. We steward the
following packages: Morphic, MorphicExtras, Etoys, FlexibleVocabularies,
Nebraska, and StarSqueak. Our mailing list is accessible at
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/morphic

About the team
----------------

Our objectives are:
- Split Morphic into several packages. Morphic, MorphicExtras, Etoys and
some others.
- Maintenance, bug fixing, reviewing other collaborations, etc.
- Help with Morphic support for ToolBuilder.
- Clean Morphic. Remove stuff from basic classes (especially Morph).
- Make packages unloadable without breaking the image.
- Handle Etoys and other packages to people with specific interest in them.

What we have achieved so far is to break the old big Morphic package into
the packages listed before, and BalloonMMFlash, Movies and Speech. This was
done by the MorphicSplitters group before the Teams model.

About last month
-----------------

On November we had little activity and did not publish new versions of the
Morphic packagers. Basically I've been quite busy with personal stuff (we
are building a new home here) and I didn't have much time for Morphic.

Edgar has been doing some testing on unloading Nebraska. This needs to be
continued.

Stef asked me to review some contributions from the community, and so I did.
Thanks go to Stef for the suggestions and to the authors.

1) PluggableListMorph refactoring by Masashi Umezawa,
http://bugs.impara.de/view.php?id=1941 .
While it looks promising, Eddie Cottongim noted that #drawOn: got much
slower. In my tests, it seems to be 4.1 times slower. If this could be
solved, I'd include it. But currently I prefer not doing so.

2) Multiple selection in PluggableListMorph by Alain Plantec,
http://bugs.impara.de/view.php?id=1083 .
We do have PluggableListMorphOfMany that already supports multiple
selection, used (for example) in ChangeList. I don't think it's good to
complicate PluggableListMorph with extra stuff. In my opinion, the
kind of powerful emphasis (ListItemMorphEmphasisModel) and such
functionality implemented here would be better used in a new morph, for
those who need it.

3) NetMorph by Masashi Umezawa,
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2005-October/096377.html .
Ultra cool, but optional in my opinion. I would prefer this being an
optional package in SqueakMap, and not part of the base image.

4) Some stuff sent to me by Andres Valloud. I still need more digging into
it to see what's useful there and how it blends with the Morph cleanup
that's going on.

So, the current status is that nothing of this was added. I hope authors of
these contributions will not feel disappointed.

About next month
------------------

Our plans for the short term (i.e. this month) are:
- BugFixing
- Look at suggestions and code contributions regarding Morphic
- Integrate what we find to be mature enough
- Enhance support for ToolBuilder

Coda
------

We are open to suggestions and code collaborations. We are specially
interested in code that:
- Fixes bugs
- Simplifies the framework
- Adds new, needed functionality, without adding too much complexity

Cheers,
Juan Vuletich