[squeak-dev] GSoC time

tim Rowledge tim at rowledge.org
Fri Feb 7 18:54:15 UTC 2014


On 07-02-2014, at 2:13 AM, Frank Shearar <frank.shearar at gmail.com> wrote:

> So. Some kind people (GSoC) are willing to throw money at us if only
> we have something for people to do.
> 
> We really, really ought to propose projects. We did nothing last year,
> and so got nothing.

A good point.

> 
> For starters, there's work to be done in finishing porting Cog to ARM.

Um, that one’s mine. I’m already being paid for that.

> What else might we usefully propose?

As you mentioned, UI builder. Chris has Maui and it is extremely interesting. HPInstitute has Morphic Designer, which is interesting but I found a bit hard to do anything with; and it uses some eventy infrastructure that made me grimace a bit. Both or either would be an interesting thing to take as a start, or inspiration, or even counter-example if you’re that way inclined.

Extended uses of Plumbin’ - there used to be a pretty neat digital circuit simulator based on the tiles-on-a-grid approach of Plumbin. Bet there are quite a lot of simulations of a similar kind. It could be a neat way to assemble and simulate rules for control systems; for example the programming of a radio control transmitter to make the assorted servos do The Right Thing when you waggle a control stick, button, dial, or lever. This has the advantage of being a Useful Thing for teaching, rather than just a Cool Language Toy. Another approach might be the Scratch style of dragging tiles to build scripts; which come to think of it is sort of a free-form variety of spreadsheet rules instead of a grid-style per Plumbin’.

Some things I’d like to se that may already exist or simply need bringing up to date-

A terminal window to talk to your OS command line; there is a way to make the Pi boot into Scratch but once you do that you have a hard time doing anything else. A terminal window would mean being able to do things like `apt-get upgrade scratch` more easily. 

A decent email facility. I have this vague recollection that Celeste still exists and some one even uses it? Again, in a boot-to-Scratch Pi it could be interesting to provide an email system. And maybe use Scratch scripting to add rules to it for sorting and filing and stuff? And given the utter balls-up that Apple have made of their email app in Mavericks recently, maybe now is the time do a good version that non-Squeakers would use!

Use of host windows. They’ve been there for almost a decade and … <crickets>. Forget grand schemes to do All Host Widgets All The Time; just make decent use of multiple host  window areas to display multiple Squeak things. 


There; that’s a couple of university departments of students kept off the streets for the summer. 

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Strange OpCodes: RDRI: Rotate Disk Right Immediate




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