[Webteam] Suggestion for Squeak Website

[Michael Davies]

On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 1:38 AM, Stephan B. Wessels <swessels at cox.net> wrote:
...
> I'm working on a re-write of my tutorial and intend, among other changes, to
> have the student begin with Squeak 3.10.  The thing is, I'm wanting to
> capture screen-shots of the web page where it is found as well as the
> original opening desktop.
>

Hi Stephan,

I wonder if you're aware of the discussion that Damien Cassou and (I
think) Oscar Nierstrasz had on the squeak-dev mailing list where they
proposed building a fixed "newbie" image that could then be used by
everyone writing tutorials. This would address one of the frequent
causes of newbie questions - "I'm trying to do X, but instead of Y
happening, I'm getting Z", and this turning out to be because of a
behaviour changing in the latest version of the image (eg default
browser changing, menu options moving or being renamed, mouse button
preferences changing, underscore behaviour, different versions of
packages being imported etc etc). The ability to configure Squeak
images to one's own preferences and requirements is one of its
strengths for experienced users, but a cause of extreme frustration to
new users (as can be seen by reading the logs of the #squeak irc
channel).

Andrew Black reflected on this a while back when he said of the
experience of getting novices into Squeak: "My greatest frustrations
in writing the [SBE] book were the following.  First,  that I didn't
know what I could assume was in the image that the reader was using!
The "standard" release didn't have most of the development tools that
I needed, and those that were there mostly didn't work.   We even had
trouble amongst ourselves (the authors) deciding on which version to
use, and when to go back and revise a chapter because the image had
been revised."

If you and the SBE team (and maybe also the Hasso Plattner-Institut
people) were to adopt such an image, it would then make sense for the
web team to make that image very prominent on the Squeak.org website,
so as to guide new users towards a managed experience.

Once such an image was prepared and included all the functionality
required by the collaborating authors, it could reasonably remain
unchanged much longer than the squeak.org image would, and so of much
more use to people coming to your tutorial in years to come (as I
expect they will, because it's an excellent introduction to
development in Squeak and Morphic).

I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on this approach.

Cheers,
Michael