Squeak Apps help push App Store over 50,000
8 June, 2009
Phil Schiller led the keynote presentation today at Apple’s Worldwide Developers’ Conference. One of the many causes for celebration he had was the phenomonal success of the iPhone App Store, which now has 50,000 applications available for download.
Although he was careful to be even-handed in giving credit to all iPhone developers for helping Apple achieve this success, he must have secretly been thanking John McIntosh, who is turning into a one-man app wave. Without John’s recent batch of new Squeak-based applications, Phil would have been left announcing the much less satisfactory figure of 49,99749,994 applications.
In case you missed it, John’s latest announcement was that his Fraction app is now available for calculations involving unlimited sized fractions and factorials, as it attempts to preserve numerical accuracy to an unprecedented degree. The new app joins the two apps based on his WikiServer that John already has on the App Store.
We look forward to seeing if the notoriously byzantine App Store approval process will be able to keep up with John’s flood of new applications.
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.
ESUG Innovation Awards 2008
28 August, 2008
This year’s winners of the ESUG Innovation Technology Awards were announced at the 16th Joint International Smalltalk Conference in Amsterdam last night. There were a record-breaking 21 entrants, with a great selection of innovative ideas and products. Voting was by all attendees of the conference, and the winners were:
1st prize – DrGeoII, Hilaire Fernandes’ development in Squeak Smalltalk of an application that allows students at primary or secondary level to create and interactively manipulate geometric figures within definable constraints, as featured on the Weekly Squeak recently (pdf description available here).
2nd prize – seaBreeze, an application from Georg Heeg eK which allows Seaside developers to work in an interactive environment to develop web content (pdf description available here).
3rd prize – iSqueak, a project from John M McIntosh, Grit Schuster and Michael Rueger, which allows Squeak to interact with multi-touch input devices such as the iPhone (pdf description available here).
The competition was sponsored by ABN Amro Bank, and the winners get prizes of €500, €300 and €200.
Following the ceremony, Georg Heeg announced that seaBreeze will be dual-licensed, with a free versions available under the MIT licence. The code will be made available once some finishing touches have been applied.
New Screencasts on DrGeoII
20 August, 2008
Hilaire Fernandes has announced that he has created over 50 screencasts illustrating the capabilities of DrGeoII. DrGeoII allows students at primary or secondary level to create and interactively manipulate geometric figures within definable constraints.
It is written using Morphic in Squeak Smalltalk, and can be embedded and mixed with existing Morph elements of the Squeak environment on the OLPC XO to produce some very impressive-looking activities to help students learn about mathematics and physics. The DrGeo wiki has lots of useful advice on how to get the best from the application.
Development of Dr. Geo II was partly sponsored by TOP, the Taiwan Open Source Project, with funding from the Taiwan Ministry of Economy, and by ESUG to promote the Smalltalk language.
CMSBox wins top usability awards
13 August, 2008
Avi Bryant alerted the Seaside mailing list to some exciting news: Cmsbox is one of the ten winners of this year’s useit.com 10 Best Application UIs of 2008, a competition intended to identify the 10 best-designed application user interfaces each year.
Cmsbox is a powerful and flexible Content Management System (CMS) which allows users to create, edit and arrange content directly on the web site. It was built by Swiss company netstyle.ch using Squeak Smalltalk, Seaside and Scriptaculous.
In describing the award, which is the latest in a string of awards won by Cmsbox, Jakob Neilsen wrote that Cmsbox made it “particularly easy for direct users to create highly usable designs [...] They have demonstrated that just one extra line of controls is all that is required to turn a website into a Web authoring environment. [...] There are no modes to switch between, no edit windows to keep track of; it is immediately clear to users what effect their actions will have on the final layout because they are always working within that final layout”.
Swazoo 2.2 beta with fast file upload released
1 August, 2008
Janko Mivšek has announced that Swazoo 2.2 is ready for beta testing, with much improved upload (input streaming) performance as a main new feature. Swazoo is an open source, vendor agnostic, dialect neutral, highly performant Smalltalk web server with resource and web request resolution framework, born on a first Camp Smalltalk 2000 in San Diego. It is used as standalone web server for static content or for running web frameworks like Seaside and Aida/Web.
On Squeak it uploads 15 times faster than before, achieving 1.5MB/s throughput locally on a Linux 3.2GHz PC. On VisualWorks it is even more impressive: 30 times better, achieving 15MB/s throughput. This means only 20s for 300MB file upload. In both cases upload performance is about half of the download one due to additional MIME parsing needed.
Janko believes that in Swazoo we now have a Smalltalk web server with comparable performance to others in terms of upload performance, meaning that Swazoo is ready for demanding upload tasks like video uploading as well as video-serving (eg for screencasts) which has been possible for a while.
Currently running on Squeak, GNU Smalltalk, Gemstone, Dolphin and VisualWorks, Swazoo appears well on its way to meeting its goal, defined in a manifesto back in 2000: “to join forces and make a really good web server in Smalltalk, open source and for all Smalltalk dialects”.
Plopp featured in MacWorld
23 July, 2008
MacWorld magazine is running a series of reviews of their favourite free and low-cost applications for the Mac, and one of their picks is Plopp, a painting tool from Impara for easily creating cartoon-like 3D scenes. Although their review doesn’t mention this (did they even know it?), Plopp was developed and runs totally in Squeak!, which of course means that it’s also available on Windows and (for free!) on Linux.
Plopp seems to be getting a lot of attention at the moment, perhaps because you can also use it to create models for use in Second Life, so congratulations to all at Impara for the recognition their work is getting!
Smalltalk Solutions 2008 – slides now available
1 July, 2008
Most of the slides from the presentations at this year’s Smalltalk Solutions conference are now on line.
The material available includes Gilad Bracha’s talk on Newspeak, James Foster’s guide to building a Seaside application using GemStone/S, Michael Rueger’s introduction to Sophie, Arden Thomas demonstrating WebVelocity in action, and Randal Schwartz’s double-header keynote: Seaside – Your Next Web Framework and an introduction to persistency solutions for use with Seaside.
There are also slides from a couple of sessions looking at the reasons for the recent resurgence of interest in Smalltalk: Arden Thomas looks at the features of Smalltalk that other languages lack, and Rob Rothwell explains how Smalltalk helps with the development of healthcare applications.
There are many more slide-packs available, and still more to be added, so please check out the conference page for more information. James Robertson is adding video and audio as it becomes available.
Hilaire Fernandes wrote to tell the Squeak-dev mailing list that the 9th Libre Software Meeting will be held at Mont de Marsan, Landes, in SW France, on 1 – 5 July. LSM is an international free software event taking place in July each year, in a French town; the first event took place in 2000 at Bordeaux. This year, Squeak/Smalltalk will be well represented with conferences and workshops on Squeak, Seaside and Sophie. There will also be a coding sprint for Pharo, a new implementation of Smalltalk based on Squeak.
For more information, see the post about the conference on Hilaire’s blog.
http://blog.ofset.org/hilaire/index.php?post/Squeak-Smalltalk-LSM-2008
Qwaq developing new fast Smalltalk VM
7 June, 2008
Eliot Miranda has posted some exciting news - he is working at Qwaq to develop Cog, a fast Smalltalk VM for Croquet. The VM will dynamically compile Smalltalk bytecodes to machine code transparently to the programmer, and execute this machine code instead of interpreting bytecode. He expects to have an initial release within a year which should execute pure Smalltalk code some 10 to 20 times faster than the current Squeak VM. The new VM will be released under the Qwaq open source licence (MIT-compatible).
Eliot will be posting notes on his progress and design decisions on his blog, and notes that the VM is to be released under the Qwaq open source licence. He’s looking to maintain compatability with the existing Croquet VM, Hydra, and Slang plugins. His first post gives lots of interesting details of work done so far, and his future plans.
Eliot is a long-time Smalltalker, having worked on VisualWorks for many years with a focus on VM development, and has recently been working with Gilad Bracha at Cadence.
