The future of Morphic (Was Re: Shrinking sucks!)

Juan Vuletich jmvsqueak at uolsinectis.com.ar
Fri Feb 4 13:54:07 UTC 2005


Hi all

I don't want to get rid of Morphic!

Recently, I've been devoting some time to a GUI application I want to build 
with Squeak.
I took a look at Tweak and found that:
- Tweak is based on a language that is not Smalltalk. I'd rather stay with 
Smalltalk.
- The primary aim of the project is to to get eToys like functionality into 
the kernel of the system and the language. Again, a non-Smalltalk language.
- I know and understand the basic ideas behind Morphic. I could not find any 
explanations of Tweak's.
Then I realized that what I need is an eToys-free Morphic.

So, I prepared a 3.7 image that has no eToys stuff, but Morphic is almost 
untouched. It is a bit under 6Mb. In this image there is some hope for mere 
mortals to understand how Morphic works and how to program new morphs and 
morphic applications. I have the scripts reduce a 3.7g image this way. (BTW, 
I also removed Nebraska, SUnit tests, and some other things I didn't need). 
There are two possible ways to make this kind of image the standard:
- Someone would need to take care of the eToys (and others) packages 
loadable from SqueakMap.
- We can just wait and hope all eToys users move to Tweak. Then we can just 
forget about old eToys and use a leaner Morphic.

Now, I'm working on a kind of morphic overhaul. I'm working on a NewMorph 
class that can be used with the regular "full" Morphic, or with my reduced 
version. I took some ideas form John Maloney on how to improve Morphic, and 
at the same time, removing lots of functionality. The central part is to 
make each NewMorph decide the coordinate system it will use for drawing and 
for locating its submorphs. It will also include better quality zooming with 
antialiasing and total pixel independence. I will probably not write new 
browsers and programming tools, the old ones are pretty good. This is only 
getting started, I will publish it when it gets to the point it's not 
embarrasing for me to show the code! Tim and Craig, I hope you remember when 
I told you about these ideas when we met in 2003.

Back to the point:
- I don't want to leave Morphic
- I want to get rid of eToys and User Scripting.
- I volunteer for working on a smaller, cleaner and eToys free Morphic.

(I haven't been participating recentry, but I hope you remember me for 
PhotoSqueak, the jpeg read-writer and the OS/2 VM.)

Juan Manuel Vuletich

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <goran.krampe at bluefish.se>
To: <jbk at umim.net>; "The general-purpose Squeak developers list" 
<squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
Sent: Friday, February 04, 2005 6:12 AM
Subject: Re: Shrinking sucks!
...

> 4. Start moving tools over to Tweak, so that we can get rid of Morphic.
> And move to newer tools where appropriate - like Omnibrowser instead of
> the old browser etc. In essence we need Omnibrowser, a workspace,
> exporer/inspectors and a debugger. At least. :)




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