Magic Words goes Open Source
25 May, 2009
Mikael Kindborg and colleagues at comikit.se have announced that their Magic Words application is now available as Open Source software.
Magic Words gives children (of all ages!) the ability to create interactive animated worlds. It has been used to allow its users to make their own friendly non-violent computer games and explore the meaning of words as part of learning how to read.
The team have made the source-code available under the MIT licence, and have provided some sample resources including pictures, text, and sounds to get you started.
The application is of course based on Squeak, and the Comikit team give detailed instructions on how to load it into a standard Squeak image.
Squeak applications now on the App Store
18 May, 2009
Following his success in getting Squeak running on the iPhone last year, John M McIntosh has announced on the Squeak-dev mailing list that he has had two applications approved for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch App Store.
The two SqueakDocs electronic books, based on Squeak and Seaside, allow users to explore the code and documentation in two Smalltalk images: a 3.10.x Squeak web developer’s image, and a Pharo web developer’s image of late April 2009. They are now available for purchase on the App Store: Squeak version, Pharo version.
The applications use Seaside to render the content to the built-in Safari browser, so they can also present content to other machines on the local network.
John is still waiting for approval to come through soon for WikiServer, a “much more complex application,” which will allow users to view and maintain wiki content on their iPhones.
Deploying a Seaside Application
12 May, 2009
Andreas Brodbeck has written an interesting blog post detailing his experiences developing, configuring and deploying a Seaside application. He seems to have found it a positive experience; indeed he writes that “Some months ago I decided myself to work with Seaside, and to develop all my upcoming web applications with it, if possible. If not possible, I will fall back to Rails. So far I am very happy with my decision and the current projects.”
Unfortunately the application is not publicly viewable, but he has had to get to grips with a lot of interesting (and potentially troublesome) technologies, including migration to Gemstone, PDF generation, object serialisation using SIXX, running under a 64-bit virtual session, using Cherokee as front-end server, Magritte for presenting data, and of course his own SeaShell deployment helper application.
Congratulations to Andreas, whose application joins many others being developed in Seaside.
