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SqueakEnd '00 Report
Last updated at 12:41 pm UTC on 16 January 2006
The 'Squeak-end 00'at Santa Barbara. March 11th 2000 V1.0.
By John M McIntosh. (JMM) johnmci@smalltalkconsulting.com
http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com


History was made this weekend, by getting various Smalltalkers together from around the world to discuss Squeak, we had an opportunity to set and reflect on goals that we could pursue for the coming year. Sometimes we get buried in the details so it was refreshing to step back and address issues about the "Squeak out of the box experience" and get group cohesion about where Squeak should go.

These notes are rough and will be redone later in the coming week, by myself or other contributors as they see fit. For the purpose of posting information early before many Squeakers and Smalltalkers head to Camp Smalltalk in San Diego I've decide to make this information available as soon as possible. If I've made a mistake or missed a name or not correctly covered a topic please correct it, that's why it's on this Swiki. Please note that on Saturday most of the event was video taped, contact STP for information on obtaining a copy of the video.

So the story begins…

Early Saturday morning I appeared at Stephen Pope's house and found John Maloney and Dan Ingalls having breakfast with Stephen. Between toast & jam, discussion flew from concepts about stereo systems complete with mercury-shielded wire, to Jitter 3 and where was Squeak going. Then off to the University…

At roughly 9:30 Stephen Pope began the discussion with: Where should Squeak go, how should the weekend progress, should we build code? Show code problems? Watch and play? Should we have Birds of a Feather sessions so people could share what they are doing?

John Maloney suggest we do some demos today since Dan Ingalls wasn't going to be here on Sunday. From there we went forward to introduce the people present at the meeting. (As STP mentioned over the weekend we had 26 people attend.) I attempted to capture some information on each speaker, however they should review and change as they see fit. You can find that information here. Squeakers at Squeakend 00

The ability to deliver 'dead on delivery' application. Hey its just an application (shrink wrapped). You don’t know it's a Smalltalk application, pocket Smalltalk delivers a Palm OS application, not Smalltalk. That of course is the key requirement and item we need to work on.

The key points of our Saturday discussion follow:


Coffee ensued…


STP gave a tour of the campus and the beach bluffs, the laid back California lifestyle.

(Pictures? Pictures? JMM: I saw some interesting Digital camera there, where do those pictures lie)

Neat Applications today? What can you do today, that we would want to do?

John Sarkela mentioned a port.

Squeak-end or Squeak-Before.

Squeak? Why it's not called Smalltalk. Well Dan said because it was not political correct at the time at Apple to call it Smalltalk. But no words of wisdom why it's called Squeak. In fact at dinner your author attempted to grill Dan Ingalls on that topic and got nothing, perhaps a sly grin…

Maloney gave an example of Morphic

First how to find out how to make the default Text font bigger.
We guessed and use find font in a selector, then fell back to 600x800
{This should be easy we suspect it's there but no-one could find it}

SqueakEnd '00 Report

Dan Ingall's Demos

Ok up to the Create research lab to see an demo from Dan Ingalls.

We got a 1024x768 projected image on acoustic tiles cool…

Dan brought up his OOPSLA demo.
{JMM OOPSLA notes are here}

Got to see some of CREATE (web views are where STP?) Pictures folks?. Also got to see the world class recording rooms. STP related that they had good expenditure on sound proofing and equipment the founding professor spend grant money on infrastructure versus computer equipment which goes obsolete from year to year.

Back to sorting the work.

John Sarkela


Tim Rowledge


However if we want to change the tools then this is a big job and a issue of freezing everything. Dan Ingalls pointed out Tim's VM work needed to be folded in, along with Jitter. Lots of critical low level work. Tim pointed out that most of the work with his VM was simple expect for one plugin. {JMM On Sunday Tim did review the plugable VM work, but your author was busy doing something else, Tim hopefully will relate more information}

Dan Ingalls pointed out discussion from a gathering like this is valuable. This can change direction from some of the original direction they were pursuing.

Dan Ingalls

Remote projects should allow you to link to content on the internet.
We need to clean up Squeak.org. We need to cleanup a release image. The user experience should be a good experience, you've only an hour to get a convert. If Squeak interest suddenly blooms then the PR is very important. If a bunch of tech writers for magazines want to spend a weekend reviewing Squeak then they should have a good experience. The Squeak Look and Feel should look mostly like stuff today. If they look unlike something today then a user is in terror.

Could we have a video, or a screen capture. Marketing material is important. Someone needs to assemble this and make it available. STP offered to build something for viewing. Tim R thought he could get Adele Goldberg to do it.
{Both these are action items guys JMM}

JMM suggest we should have a book "Fun with Squeak in 24 hours."

Dan Ingalls said all this is valuable

DVD is coming technology, CDROM quicktime, etc as light weight publication can drive heavy publication like O'Rilley.

Laurence Rozier then discussed where does Dan Shafer sit? Dan has lot of exposure as a speaker, has professionally interested in being an promoter for Squeak. But we need to address the first hour experience. If we can do the polish then we can get the exposure. So how should we proceed?

What does Dan Ingalls want to take home? The top layer isn't hard to do, but it makes little difference to the stuff under the covers, like callbacks, multi-threading. But it will make the user experience better. It should look like a marketing slide when opened. Dan is happy with were things were going in the Squeak-end.
{JMM think -> cake icing, worry about contents later, carrot, banana?}

It was aksed what is content size from a screen resolution? Disney does something like 342x512? to fit content into browser panel with advertising etc. Some discussion, no resolution? 1024768?

Marketing? Declare it a project. See who signs up.
{who}

JMM stated Gnome, need an interface to or from us.

Some pointed out lots of applications are just simple business stuff, they want a page form layout. Some trivial hooked up logic. Fabrik answers that.

At this point we retired for dinner. STP arranged for the entire group, plus some spouses to met for dinner were we all had a wonderful time for many hours til very late into the evening.

Did you know Dan has an interest in weather stations?

Looking for SqueakEnd'00 Sunday?