Making Squeak more accessible and used - reversing the trend

Brad Fuller brad at bradfuller.com
Wed Jan 31 16:15:20 UTC 2007


Ralph Johnson wrote:
> Celeste is an e-mail reader.  Scamper is a web browser.  Both need
> improvement before they are killer apps, though I think some people
> ues Celeste every day.  See http://map.squeak.org
> 
> Croquet is in some ways a radical rethinking of what the web could be
> like.  Sophie is very definitely a radical rethinking of what a book
> could be like.  You should take a look at those projects.
> 
> Squeak is more likely to attract people by doing something unique like
> Croquet or Sophie than by trying to compete with the rest of the world
> with e-mail and web browsing.  But, if you can get people to make
> Celeste or Scamper good enough that a lot of people use them every
> day, more power to you!

Thanks all for your comments.

I completely agree that competition with today's email and browser apps
would be tough considering the competition and the ingrained usage and
preferences of users. I was only thinking of the best way to motivate
new users to squeak with something they already understand but with much
cooler features.

Another way is to create a squeak app that satisfies an unfulfilled user
need but make it extremely easy to use (so they don't give up because
it's "too radical".) I like this approach better, but that requires more
brain power on the frontend of the squeak community.

So, it came down to a decision of what could be successful.

There's nothing wrong, though, in doing both, like Yann's idea of the
multipurpose bag that eliminates the usage of a filesystem or Derek's
multimedia management system or social networking tools coupled with
Scamper and Celeste completion.


-- 
brad fuller
www.bradfuller.com



More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list