The Weekly Squeak

Great news from the Sophie team - they’ve now released Sophie 1.0, available now from the Sophie website.

Sophie is software for writing and reading rich media documents in a networked environment. The team’s goal is to open up the world of multimedia authoring to a wide range of people and institutions and in so doing to redefine the notion of a book or “academic paper” to include both rich media and mechanisms for reader feedback and conversation in dynamic margins.

The team has produced lots of tutorial and documentation information, including some screencasts showing how easy multimedia authoring can be. Download Sophie to find out for yourself!

Sophie is based on Squeak, and so runs on Mac, Windows and Linux operating systems.

Philippe Marschall announced the Seaside - One Click Experience!

There has been a lot of talk recently about improving the Smalltalk, Squeak and Seaside experience for new users. Especially to make it easier and faster to get started. The two vendors that support Seaside are working in this area. That does not mean Squeak can not lead the way. Today we present you the Seaside One-Click Experience [1] for OS X, Windows and Linux based on the work done by the Sophie Project [2].

Just download the zip-archive, extract it and double click on the executable for your platform and you have Seaside 2.8 final running.

Cheers
The Squeak Seaside Team

[1] http://www.seaside.st/download/squeak#167943699
[2] http://www.sophieproject.org/

By Daniel Lanovaz

I’m ready! Sophie, Croquet, Seaside, Scratch, Plopp, OLPC … The Era of Squeak and Smalltalk is upon us!

As the sun rose somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, the dark fading away, and the cold of over a month starting to thaw, on the west coast of North America it is still dark and John M. McIntosh has only a deep and tired yawn as thanks and a simple form of celebration marking the release of Sophie RC3*.

It is fitting that midnight should toll during this new release. The clock chimes to mark the occasion of new timeline commands; the ability to play movies connected and controlled by time itself, when time itself rests to zero for a new day. A new day indeed: the future of electronic books.

Sophie is free and open source software built on Squeak. You can get your own copy of Sophie and start creating your own electronic books now. Check out this new video of what Sophie can do.

Could you use Sophie to write really cool new electronic books? Sure. How about develop a new interactive brochure for your company? Yeah! How about delivering real engaging content to your potential voter base? Hmmm…

How would you use Sophie?

(*available soon watch for RC3)

There has been a lot of talk about the future of Smalltalk. There are number of Object Oriented Languages that are candidates for replacing Smalltalk. Why has Smalltalk lasted so long? Why do business software suppliers still choose Smalltalk? Who are the people that still bet on the future of Smalltalk and how do they manage to succeed. Read the rest of this entry »

Sophie is out!! Sophie is open-source Squeak Smalltalk based software for authoring extreemly creative new eBooks. Sophie is licensed under a version of the new BSD license.

What is Sophie?

Sophie is a program for creating digital multimedia books. Sophie will let you make books that are impossible in print, with video and audio tracks, automatic actions, and shared feedback.

The word book can be widely interpreted: your book can resemble a regular book, with text and pictures, or it can be a book comprised completely of videos, or audio clips and images in a slideshow, or all of the above. Sophie books can even include other books, link out to the web, and allow reader interaction.

Sounds great! Get the Sophie Early Release Candidate 1 Now!

Check out these other useful links: http://www.futureofthebook.org/content/Mellon.pdf
http://weeklysqueak.wordpress.com/2006/12/20/oopsla-there-it-is-oopsla-2006/
The second one is a video that demos Sophie. The demo starts at: 23:32.

The Sophie Team

Sophie is a project of the Institute for the Future of the Book. It relies on the talent and collaboration of people around the world.

• Germany: Impara, under the leadership of Michael Rueger and Bernd Eckardt
• US: Nick Matelan, Steve Riggins, Bob Stein, Dan Visel, Jesse Wilbur
• Canada: John McIntosh, Tim Rowledge
• Bulgaria: Astea

Principal funding for Sophie is provided by Research in Information Technology Program of the the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Additional support comes from the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts.

Gilad Bracha is a legend in Object Oriented Programming. He is the Co-Author of the Java Language Specification and one of the major contributors to Strongtalk which has just been released by Sun under an Open Source License.

Gilad is forming a team at Cadence and is raising eye brows with his latest hires. Eliot Miranda and Vassili Bykov recently left Cincom to join Gilad at Cadence . Eliot is well-known known as a Master of Smalltalk Development. Vassili Bykov was the lead tool builder of VisualWorks. We can’t help wondering about the team of Gilad, Eliot, and Vassili. I spoke with Gilad about Cadence, Smalltalk, and Open Source. Read the rest of this entry »

See Craig’s Spoon update, inforamtion on Sophie and more!