Squeak Board candidates wanted
20 February, 2010
Göran Krampe has begun the process for this year’s elections for the Squeak Oversight Board.
The Squeak Oversight Board (SOB) consists of seven members from our community, all of whom are elected by popular vote. The members are responsible for
- building a legal presence – currently by working with the Software Freedom Law Center as part of their Conservancy;
- providing the network services that support the various mailing lists and repositories that in turn make a community possible;
- helping coordinate the various interest groups and projects being pursued by Squeakers;
- making decisions where there is no clear community consensus.
The current board members are:
- Jecel Assumpcao Jr
- Ken Causey
- Bert Freudenberg
- Craig Latta
- Andreas Raab
- Randal Schwartz
- Igor Stasenko
(From http://www.squeak.org/Foundation/Board)
The schedule and process of the Election is as follows:
Nominations
Candidates should nominate themselves by 3rd March and start their campaign on the squeak-dev mailing list. Or if you nominate someone else, make sure that person really wants to run. Göran will not put anyone on the candidate list until that person makes it known on squeak-dev that he/she does run.
Final candidate list
The list will be closed on 3rd March. The candidates should ideally present themselves on squeak-dev, unless they have already done so, and the community can ask questions.
Online election starts
The voting period starts on 10th March 6PM (18.00 UTC) and is one week long. Ballots are sent out via email.
Online election ends
The voting process will end on 17th March 6PM (18.00 UTC). Results will be announced immediately when the election ends.
Registering
If you were invited to vote last year you are already on the voter list, no worries! If you are a new Squeaker and wish vote do ONE of the following:
- Get a “known” Squeaker to vouch for you. If a known Squeaker sends an email to voters@squeak.org giving your name and email address then Göran will add you.
- Send an email to voters@squeak.org yourself (and CC to squeak-dev if you like) with information/arguments showing that you are indeed serious about voting and that you are indeed a Squeaker.
When the voting period starts all voters will receive an email with instructions and a link to the voting website.
More information
Everything about the election, including schedule above and more, can be tracked here:
Scratch featured in “Communications of the ACM”
20 November, 2009
Scratch is the cover story of the November 2009 issue of CACM, the monthly magazine of the Association for Computing Machinery.
Scratch is a visual programming language, developed in Squeak, that makes it easy to create interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share these creations on the web. Aimed at children between the ages of 8 and 16, Scratch has developed a thriving community, with over 1000 new projects being uploaded to the site every day.
In inviting the Scratch team to submit an article, the editor of CACM explained his motivation: “A couple of days ago, a colleague of mine (CS faculty) told me how she tried to get her 10-year-old daughter interested in programming, and the only thing that appealed to her daughter (hugely) was Scratch.”
The submitted article is also available for viewing online.
Squeak goes to Mars
8 January, 2009
Esteban Lorenzano gave Squeakers on Mac OS X a nice little Christmas present to see out 2008, with the release of Mars, an MVC framework for Squeak built using Cocoa. Mars is a plugin, and will run in any fork of Squeak, and as you can see above, is integrated with OmniBrowser.
Esteban notes that one of his main objectives in developing Mars is to keep it small and simple, in order to allow it to be executed in small environments such as the iPhone, (using John McIntosh’s new VM and Edgar de Cleene’s SqueakLightII minimal images).
Mars is MIT licensed, and can be downloaded from the Mars homepage, which also has posts following the progress of Esteban’s work. Esteban adds that Mars is still in the pre-alpha stage, and he looks forward to bug reports, feature requests, comments, and of course, code.
Building user interfaces in Squeak
24 December, 2008
Chris Muller has released a thoroughly updated and documented version of his user interface framework Maui. Chris has described Maui as a “naked objects” Morphic-based UI builder that allows rapid UI creation based on object-message composition.
Maui includes a number of light satellite frameworks that supply various application services like documents, object-search, background process management with progress monitoring. It also provides a number of tools which allow applications to be synthesized quickly, without the need to write any user-interface code.
Chris has written a fifty page document describing Maui and giving examples of how to use it to build user interfaces for complex applications. In this document he also discusses future work for Maui, including the tantalising possibility of extending it to support the development of web applications.
Aliens coming to Squeak
8 December, 2008
John McIntosh has ported Newspeak‘s Aliens FFI implementation to Squeak. John notes that the port is in its early days, and more work and support will be needed to implement Aliens support across the full range of Squeak platforms.
As a result of this interest in Aliens, Gilad Bracha has written a post giving an overview of Aliens, the thinking that went into it, and how it works. FFI allows a programming language to make use of services written in another language, and Gilad suggests that the lack of a standard, fully-featured FFI has been an ongoing problem for Smalltalk developers. In particular, John writes that “Squeak VM’S existing FFI has been found to be buggy bloated and slow” (though see Andreas’ comments on this below).
John’s code, under the Apache licence, is available at http://www.squeaksource.com/Alien.html, and more information on his implementation can be found at the Alien swiki page.
Exploring history using Squeak multimedia
23 November, 2008
Germán Arduino writes with news of a very interesting multimedia application his company has been developing for the Spanish state of Extremadura. The application consists of a number of units, each developed in Squeak using the multimedia-application framework FMA, originally developed by Diego Gómez Deck. The application will be available in Spanish, English and Portuguese, and is intended to be used by visitors to the region. It includes a variety of games, puzzles and quizzes to help the user test their understanding.
Germán notes that, as usual with all the Extremadura projects, the software is open sourced and is available to download from Squeaksource, under the name Albaplata project.
Germán’s post on the project has more information and screenshots.
Get recording your Squeak videos now!
19 July, 2008
The Squeak mailing lists have recently seen a surge of interest in getting videos published to help explain Squeak and Smalltalk to developers coming to the language and environment for the first time.
In response to this Randal L. Schwartz has set up a new Squeak Smalltalk group on vimeo.com to allow Squeakers to easily upload and share their videos.
Videos can be a great way to help people quickly pick up a lot of complex information, which makes this an opportunity for Squeakers old and new to help promote Squeak. If there are any topics that you think would suit a short video, why not try recording one and publishing it? If you’re the developer of a powerful Squeak developer tool, and you’re amazed that no-one seems to use all of its functionality, this would be a great way to expose all of those features in a compelling way.
If you’re a new developer struggling with Squeak, let us know what topics you’d like to see covered in video tutorials. If you’ve got any recommendations for recording and editing software for Windows, Mac or Linux, please leave a comment.
Qwaq, Intel Collaborate on Enhanced Virtual Workspace Product
21 September, 2007
For those of you who want to see Croquet in action, check out the keynote by Justin Rattner from Intel’s developer forum in San Francisco this morning:
http://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/events/idffall_2007/webcasts.htm
The topic is “The rise of the 3D Internet” and Croquet is featured both in the talk in general (as an example of P2P collaboration environment) and live via a Qwaq Forums demonstration (about 15mins into the talk).
Also, a link to the press release of the Qwaq/Intel collaboration:
http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20070920corp_a.htm
http://www.qwaq.com/press/release_2007-09-20.html
