Dear all!


It's now one and a half year since I met Smalltalk and Squeak. And I am convinced that it was the best thing that could have happened to me! I am very grateful that this beautiful ecosystem exists, a haven of simple expressivity and usability, of liveness and explorability, and a haven of collaborativity. And I am even more grateful that still in 2019, where more and more hip, short-lived environments & languages attract your attention (of which, certainly, many may be smart and useful, but most definitely, hardly anyone will come close to Squeak in terms of abstraction and modifiability) - even today, you are being here and keep contributing to Squeak!

I would like to thank you for all the energy you daily put into development and maintenance of Squeak, and for being such a great community.

</laudation> ;-)


This year, I had the idea to celebrate Squeak with a small collection of XmasDecorations. These include several small modifications of the Trunk image, with the aim to bring the Christmas spirit into our favorite system. They're nothing special, but I think they are a good example for the advantages of Squeak's universal extensibility:


[cid:c2334de2-7f43-46a2-a08f-5f1d38e92ce2]


Features include, but are not limited to:

⭐ a Christmas theme (compatible with your preferred UI theme, supports both light & dark mode)

⭐ a new full-screen WallpaperMorph

⭐ dynamic snow blizzards (with performance optimization)

⭐ and further, more or less hidden features!


If you would like to download it, you are cordially invited to do so! Everything you need to do is:

  1.  Update your Trunk image
  2.  Do it:

Metacello new
   baseline: 'XmasDecorations';
   repository: 'github://LinqLover/XmasDecorations:release/packages';
   load.

  3.  And don't be afraid of Christmas Every Day, the integrated Christmas Detection™ will automatically undecorate your image on January, 6th (unless you opt-out via Apps > XmasDecorations)!

The graphics were created in cooperation with a few fellow students and a lot of Google; but in the main, I'm an enthusiast in terms of software design, not of graphics design, so don't expect an artistic masterpiece :P

The source code can be found on GitHub<https://github.com/LinqLover/XmasDecorations>. I don't need to say that every kind of feedback or contribution is highly welcome.

I would like to wish you lots of fun with XmasDecorations & Squeak in general, and a merry Christmas time, online as well as offline.

Best regards,
Christoph
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