One of smalltalk's wonderful features is it's prototyping ability, 
that's true. I think what you are proposing is to create native apps 
with Squeak to get developers excited about the development 
possibilities of Squeak.

But, I think we would go down the wrong road, and do a real disservice, 
if we encouraged building native OS applications. Squeak moves beyond 
the OS and vertical applications (or, never been there) into a world not 
necessarily requiring an operating system - on into a personal 
environment where user's can manipulate objects for their own needs on 
any hardware.

(I used the word "application" in my original msg because I didn't know 
what else to use. Using the word "object" is ok, but doesn't convey the 
idea of an object that is feature-rich to satisfy a particular higher 
order need (like a web browser does.))

What we need is to convince Mr. Dell to sell computers with Squeak on it 
and nothing else. That would be the ultimate.



J J wrote:
> I have been thinking about this stuff as well.
> 
> Vista is out, and the places I read think Microsoft may have opened the 
> door for some competition (due to trying to force DRM down everyone's 
> throats, etc.).  If Steve Jobs goes for it, Micheal Dell said he is 
> interested in shipping Dells with Mac OS on them.  Some people are even 
> saying Linux may gain some big market share.
> 
> So what this means to me is, people will be looking for an easy way to 
> make GUI applications on these platforms.  I know nearly nothing about 
> the MAC world, but in Linux the only RAD tool I am aware of is a code 
> generator for GTK.
> 
> Now in Smalltalk we always say (and I believe) that we can be much more 
> productive then other languages.  So I think it may be time to prove it.
> 
> I don't know how many of you have used Dolphin, but it is an amazing 
> system.  It only works on windows, but the GUI is wonderful and looks 
> just like a normal windows app.  And what is more, after you build an 
> application, it has tools to automatically package up the application 
> you write and turn it into a MSI kind of package.  This includes turning 
> certain parts into DLL's so that if you write multiple applications they 
> can share libraries, etc., etc..
> 
> And I think Dolphin is currently the perfect system for building native 
> windows apps.  You get as much, or more speed then a VB environment but 
> vastly more power.
> 
> What would be nice, is if Squeak had something like this.  A great GUI 
> builder (maybe it has already) and some way that we could use some 
> system to turn an application we write into a native Linux/Mac OS 
> package.  Well, native looking.  If you check what Dolphin installs you 
> would find a smalltalk interpreter in there.  The payback with the 
> installer is, we can then submit "binaries" to distributions like Debian 
> for any applications we make.  The end user doesn't need to know it is 
> Smalltalk.  If we end up becoming a big player in the Linux and/or MAC 
> world, people will be *begging* us to share how we are doing it.
> 
> With a rapid GUI development tool bound with the productivity of the 
> Smalltalk language and the platform independence of Squeak we could have 
> quite an advantage in the native UI space.  And I understand the 
> concerns about making apps that do things that already exist, but what 
> we have to remember is that all applications change all the time.  What 
> a Word processor looked like 5 years ago is a little different then what 
> they look like today and will be still more different in another 5.  Not 
> drastically, but new features are being added.  All we have to do is 
> keep up with the features they have and add our own here and there.  To 
> take a page from Paul Graham's book, when ever a "competitor" adds a 
> feature, we can have it the next day.
> 
> Think about Mozilla for example.  They are pretty advanced, but it is an 
> enormous code base in C.  They can't add new core features quickly.
> 
> I still believe the web will play an even larger roll in the future then 
> now, but we will always have to have *some* native apps (a browser if 
> nothing else).  And if MAC gets a bigger percentage of the desktop 
> market share (and maybe even Linux), this could open up an opportunity 
> that wasn't there before.  And I don't think anyone can move to cover 
> that gap as quick as Smalltalk can.
> 
>> From: Brad Fuller <brad at bradfuller.com>
>> Reply-To: The general-purpose Squeak developers 
>> list<squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
>> To: squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org
>> Subject: Making Squeak more accessible and used - reversing the trend
>> Date: Tue, 30 Jan 2007 18:05:01 -0800
>>
>> All,
>> <sniped>
> 
> _________________________________________________________________
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> 
> 


-- 
brad fuller
www.bradfuller.com