The Weekly Squeak

Author: Brad Fuller

  • Coming Soon – Open Source Squeak Book!

    Last week at ESUG, co-author Stéphane Ducasse announced a new book will be available in mid-September entitled “Squeak By Example“. First released as a beta version, and totally free and open-source, you can find out more at the book’s website.

  • Coder clears head… has fun…

    The Weekly Squeak often highlights news of Squeak professionals. Today I’d like to focus on a programmer new to Squeak who said some darn nice things about it. As with most of us, Squeak seemed fascinating yet unreachable when we first approached the system that contained itself. Heck, unlike most languages and environments, you have the whole world in the palm of your mouse-hand. That alone seems rather daunting.

    Tom Pierce recently blogged he’s having a blast:

    “I decided I needed to dedicate some time to it and not blow it off as I had so many times before. Boy, am I glad I did. It’s been 3 weeks or so now, and I’m growing extremely fond of Squeak. I have worked through some of the tutorials on Morphic programming. I’ve also played around with some of the Morphic direct programming using Viewers and scripts. I’ve been studying code and extended FileList2 to allow tagging files and storing the results with SPrevayler. I’ve been having lots of fun.

    “That brings me to what is continuing to pull me into Squeakland. I’m having fun. Squeak is just fun to use and hack around in. It makes me feel creative because not only can I code up things easily, but, thanks to Morphic, I can decorate my projects and workspaces with pictures, text, drawings, etc. In fact, I could use those same elements in my Morphic applications. It just makes me feel like anything is possible and that I’m some mad, creative inventor in my little virtual lab.

    Thank you Squeak team.”

    I couldn’t have said it any better, Tom.

    You may have had similar experiences when you first delved into the world of Squeak. If you’d like to spin pleasurable, or not so pleasurable, memories, please do so in the comments below.

  • Yabba Dabble Do!

    Dynamic Languages 2

    Smallthought Systems, the authors of the Seaside-based online spreadsheet app Dabble dB, have a brand new application for the Facebook crowd: Dabble Do (no relation to Fred Flintstone, but “Yabba Dabble Do!” could be their tagline!)

    ToDo Lists are aplenty, but this one has a couple of neat features. Instead of a calendar popping up, the user can simply write: “tomorrow” or “next Wednesday” (although I did find a bug when entering “next wednesday”. The icon displayed “this week” instead of “next week”.) Another interesting feature is assigning events for your friends. You simply type your friend’s name, assign a task to him and press “Do it!”. I don’t know how this will pan out, but it will be interesting to track how friends bang on each other. It could prove to be a fun way for friends to communicate with one another.

    If you’re a Facebook user, it’s worth checking out!

    More about Dabble Do: