The Weekly Squeak

Category: Publicity

  • SqueakFest ’07 at Columbia College Chicago

    SqueakFest ‘07

    We have lift off. Columbia College Chicago and Viewpoints Research Institute today announced the dates and location for SqueakFest ’07.

    SqueakFest ’07 will be held at

    Columbia College Chicago

    August 1, 2 & 3

    Please mark your calendars and help spread the word about this exciting event for educators, parents, community and technical leaders, and developers. There will be hands on workshops, key note presentations, panel discussions and more. Come learn, share you experiences, and show off your Squeak Etoys projects. There are also plans for a special OLPC track where you can learn more about this worthwhile initiative.

    Check back for more information as this exciting event takes shape www.squeakland.org. Please save the date!

  • CMSBox built on Squeak and Seaside

    CMSBox

    CMSbox is a Squeak3.9/Seaside2.8 powered CMS which has been made available by netstyle.ch for the Swiss marketplace, it has excellent features and already an impressive list of references.

    The site is not currently available in English but here is a Google translation. It’s great to see more and more businesses based on Squeak and Seaside.

  • Can your book do this?

    Books

    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)

  • Minding Your Business With Smalltalk (part 2 of 4)

    Smalltalk window

    In our last article we spoke with Michael Rueger.

    Today we talk with Steve Hunter. Steve started with OO languages way back in 1985 at General Electric. He used Eiffel, C++, and Objective-C which were the “hot” OO languages at the time. Steve says that he was strongly influenced by Bertrand Meyer’s OO Software Construction Book. His educational background in software/systems analysis and design techniques lead Steve to contribute to the work Object Modeling Technique by GE, and have continued to inspire Steve throughout his career.

    Steve’s joined ParcPlace and was impressed by the ease of use and powerful development environment of Smalltalk. Particularly impressive was the VisualWorks debugger, and the cross platform nature of the VM and the dynamic prototyping nature which showed such great potential in market growth.

    Steve believed strongly in the benefits of business modeling and saw the merger between Digitalk and ParcPlace as a mismatch of intention between R&D and commercial engineering. In 1995 Steve started Hunter Object Systems and then in 2000 created Agilense. He created EA WebModeler which is a metadata driven modeling solution for Enterprise Architecture and took it to market. Agilense has many very large customers including Sun Microsystems. The most notable component of EA WebModeler for our community is the Squeak based graphical modeler.

    I spoke with Steve about EA WebModeler, what it is like depending on Open Source software like Squeak, and more. (more…)

  • Minding Your Business With Smalltalk (Part 1 of 4)

    Minding Your Business With Smalltalk
    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. (more…)

  • CIO Insight Interview with Alan Kay

    CIO Insight magazine has published an interview with Smalltalk’s and Squeak’s father, Alan Kay. The interview, titled “Alan Kay: The PC Must Be Revamped—Now”, covers many topics such as the past, present and future of computing, Squeak and Croquet, the OLPC project and the other initiatives of ViewPoints Research Institute, and the need to reinvent the PC in order for computing to leap forward.