
Thanks to a lot of very hard work by Giovanni Corriga all the mentors and applicants, Squeak was selected for five projects in the Google Summer of Code. (more…)

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…)

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…)
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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
https://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.
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.

For those of you that couldn’t make it to Ian’s talk here is a video of the presentation. (more…)

Spend Valentines Day with Ian.
Many Squeak packages have been released in the past months. Here’s a quick list:
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. (more…)
Not all shortcuts in Squeak are Obvious. The Seaside list was just discussing some of them. (more…)