The Weekly Squeak

Category: Press

  • Squeak is now on Mastodon!

    Squeak is now on Mastodon!

    You can also find us on Fosstodon, a Mastodon instance focused on free and open-source software, where we will share tips and updates about Squeak. It can be another way to keep up with Squeak and connect with the community.

    Follow Squeak on Mastodon: https://fosstodon.org/@squeak

    Mastodon is just one of the places where you can find Squeak updates. You can continue reading here on Squeak News or subscribe to our mailing lists at https://lists.squeakfoundation.org/.

    Have a great time with Smalltalk and keep on Squeaking!

  • Squeak 6.1 Released!

    Squeak 6.1 Released!

    The following was announced on the Squeak mailing lists on August 10, 2026. You can find the announcement thread on the mailing lists (here). Thanks to everyone who has contributed, provided input, and used Squeak!

    You can try out Squeak 6.1 in your browser! Just go to try.squeak.org to get started.

    Below is the official mailing list announcement:

    Hi all —

    We are happy to announce the release of Squeak 6.1! Save the Date! There will be a Squeak Release Party on September 2nd, 2026! If you want to, bring a short demo along. More info will follow soon.

    Go ahead, visit our website [1], experience our interactive release notes [2], and try it out for yourself [3]!

    Thank you all for the contributions! 🙂

    Best,
    Marcel and Christoph (on behalf of the Squeak Community)

    [1] https://www.squeak.org/
    [2] https://squeak.org/release_notes/6.1/
    [3] https://files.squeak.org/6.1/Squeak6.1-23976-64bit/

    Have a great time with Smalltalk and keep on Squeaking!

  • Squeak 4.5 Released!

    squeak4.5

    From Chris Muller:

    So!  Let it be known!  Squeak 4.5 is released!

    Home page is here:  http://www.squeak.org

    4.5 release notes are here:  http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6193

    Excellent Job Everyone!!  Can you tell we are excited!

  • Smalltalk under the Pi: an Interview with tim Rowledge

    tim

    Don’t miss Tim’s interview with SmalltalkInspect!  You can find it here: Smalltalk under the Pi: an Interview with tim Rowledge

    In this episode we talk to tim Rowledge about his work on Smalltalk VMs over the years, especially for the RISC OS Platform and ARM machines.. The latest and probably hottest thing in this arena is his port of Squeak to the Raspberry Pi. This is not only cool in itself, but more importantly enables Raspberry Pi users to use Scratch and EToys on this little machine on RISC OS (the Raspbian Linux version existed before). You can probably imagine how much fun we had in recording this session.

     

  • Smalltalks 2010 – conference report

    Smalltalks 2010 took place last weekend, meaning that the post-conference reports have started hitting the blogs, and they’re universally enthusiastic about the content, organisation and atmosphere of the event.

    Organised by Fundacion Argentina de Smalltalk (FAST), and hosted this year by Universidad Tecnológica Nacional, in Concepción del Uruguay, Smalltalks aims to “strengthen the Argentine and international Smalltalk communities through the exchange of works, experiences and anecdotes connected with this technology or related matters”. This year’s speakers included Gilad Bracha, Eliot Miranda, Lukas Renggli and many many more (see the conference home page for a full listing and descriptions of talks).

    German Arduino described it as an “excellent event, with very very good organization—thanks to the hard work of FAST people—and high level technical talks”.

    Felipao Banados was attending his first Smalltalk conference, and was also impressed: “I remember talking with classmates and hearing things like ‘Yeah, Smalltalk, nice. But where can you work on that afterwards?’ Well, there ARE a lot of interesting places to do it, and there is a need for smalltalk programmers.”

    Andrés Valloud posted some rocking photos of the social event, and reported that the conference even got coverage in the local paper, including a video interview with Hernán Wilkinson.

    As James Robertson wrote: “Sounds a lot like ESUG to me – and that’s a good thing.”

  • Scratch featured in “Communications of the ACM”

    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.

  • CMSBox wins top usability awards

    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”.

  • Plopp featured in MacWorld

    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!

  • Waveplace in the US Virgin Islands

    WavePlace

    WavePlace 2

    Hi everyone,
    We’ve just posted two new videos from the St John Waveplace pilot, which concluded three weeks ago. The first shows mentoring during the pilot. The second shows students presenting their Etoys storybooks.
    1) Scenes from the St John pilot (4 minutes)
    2) The St John Storybook Awards (8 minutes)
    We will be posting the actual storybooks to our website soon so you can see them for yourself.
    In other news, the Haiti pilot will resume next week, since things have calmed down in Port-Au-Prince. The kids and teachers are well.
    As always, if you’d like to hear more from us, please subscribe to our newsletter or donate money on our website to help with our courseware and pilots.
    Take care,
    Tim
    —
    Timothy Falconer
    Waveplace Foundation
    610-797-3100

  • Seaside startup snapped up

    Auctomatic

    The news is spreading that Auctomatic, a Vancouver-based startup using Seaside, has been bought by Live Current Media for $5 million. The company, which produces a tool to ease selling and inventory management for eBay sellers, was funded by a number of investors including Paul Graham’s technology investment company Y Combinator, and its staff including founders Kulveer Taggar, Harjeet Taggar and Patrick Collison will join the new owners. Lots more details are available from Phillip Kast’s blog.
    It looks like Vancouver is becoming a very exciting place to be for Seaside developers!

    [Edit: Corrected the information about Y Combinator]