Nobody should ever be looking for a Squeak project and not be able to find one. Here are some moderate-sized things someone would love to see, but probably won't have time to work on in the near future:
Just curious... what does anyone who might happen upon this page think about code-bartering? Say Henry wants an email server, and Jack wants a MOD-style music tracker. Henry can't/doesn't want to write the email server, but would code up a tracker if Jack writes an email server, himself not able to/doesn't want to write a tracker.
Also, newbies might ask for, say, a better Jabber client in trade for some well-written documentation or something like that.
A port of the Squeak VM to Palm OS (preferably Garnet). Since Squeak is supposed to be "portable", it would be pretty cool to see a handheld version of it.
A configuration application that lets me set up my wheel mouse so that the right button is red, the left button is yellow and a "wheel click" is blue.
More ideally, a reworking of the mouse buttons Preferences so that mice of all types could be easily configured as the user wishes. Umur Ozkul (umur@writeme.com) wants:
Rolodex system, for contact management. (Hint: Use the rolodex example in BobsUI)
Interesting–a possible start. It could use documentation, and ideally it should be divided from the UI so that you can plug it into other applications. -Lex Spoon)
LeandroCaniglia elaborates: There is a Morphic Wrappers package available allowing any object to be included in Morphic. We use that package all the time in our daily work. The package contains some interesting wrappers (ClassMorphicWrappres and BitmappedMorphicWrappers are examples of them) and is a framework inviting you to add new ones. I think Pablo is trying to promote the package.
Peter Smet mailto:peter_smet@hotmail.com wants
a public domain smalltalk ORB (CORBA 2.0) would be excellent. I noticed in the mailing list that Alan Kay is not keen on CORBA, but it seems to be like a 'universal glue' for objects and non-objects alike. It would also mean Smalltalk could be seamlessly integrated with other languages, giving project managers the option of doing different parts of projects in different languages (allowing Smalltalk to 'get its foot in the door' more often, perhaps)....?
Code requests would like this too, but would want minimum of CORBA 2.2 compliance. See SqueakOrb for related discussion.
an IDL compiler (to squeak, of course) and an ORB ... but it seems like Peter has taken the lead on developing one; way to go Peter.
Also, are people delivering products to customers using Squeak? If so, how so? I work in distributed enviroments where other people are doing the GUIs, so a full-blown headless Squeak would be great:
A Win32 API wrapper library (for doing stuff on Windoze and other platforms that have Win32 support) (see WindowsApiCalls)
Object Persistence (or a disk based image with virtual memory for handling objects)
An Object Transaction Service
Support for multiple VMs to share an object space
Support for multiple name spaces
A generic mechanism for moving objects into and out of an image
A mechanism for packaging objects to be loaded and unloaded
Object, package and name space versioning support
An object constraint mechanism (to correctly do what Java interfaces and staticly typed languages do badly)
With all of this, Squeak should become an environment where many people can do work in the same image, spanning many machines, and doing dynamic load balancing (a much better solution than CORBA or COM)
Stephen,
Transactions, persistence, name spaces etc will all be handled by CORBA. CORBA should also be able to accessthe native platform, if the platform objects are compliant. And you would get the advantage of tying together objects created with different languages. Multiple people working in the same image is too Smalltalk-centric...
Sean McGrath mailto:sean@email.ces.ucsf.edu wants
page up and down keys to scroll a text window.
...
I've written page up and page down support for both MVC and Morphic. It's been tested on V2.5 and V2.6a. The code was included in the 2.6 official release. The link to the code I published has been removed since it's now part of the base product. – Stephan B. Wessels
These have showed up in recent Squeaks:
Finalization (difficult without an object table)
Weak References (and staged references)
Brian Ewins wants, just for a laugh:
SqueakOS :o).
This must surely be possible now using the OSKit http://www.cs.utah.edu/projects/flux/oskit/, (which has already formed a basic OS for 3 other languages, including Java) and Squeakette.
Like I say, this is just a fun challenge, but it would be nice to be able to boot up into Squeak...
Take a look at SqueakNOS. We first thought of naming it SqueakOS, but then we realized it's Squeak No Operating System (-:
It's currently booting and starting the VM! 27-04-2000
........
Brian and others, check http://swain.webframe.org/squeak/floppy/. This one is based on a Linux kernel (which is not truely ideal for Squeak, but it is an attempt). There is also another project using the OSKit, of which I don't have the link here. It is currently a CLI-based Squeak. Squeak3.10.2-bc
John Gardner (gardner@spectranet.ca) wants:
Remember Outliners? How about an outliner which saves text in HTML format?
Let's go one further. How about a minimal wordprocessor which natively saves documents in HTML and GIF (for embedded pictures).
ANSI Smalltalk draft compatible language extensions (ie. temp vars in blocks - NB this would mean fixing the block arguments problem as well, ie. both Squeak VM, compiler and block support code would have to be changed)
[Richard A. Harmon (mailto:harmonra@webname.com):
I've implemented all the ANSI Standard messages in Smalltalk Express
and ported the Fundamental through part of the Collection protocols plus the ScaledDecimal and DateAndTime protocols to Squeak. I never got my implementation of the Exception protocol working, but other folks have done it for Squeak.
I've finished an implementation of a facility to read and write files in ANSI Smalltalk Interchange Format (SIF) for Squeak and Dolphin. I'm currently packaging them up for an alpha release (real soon now–I've been saying this for months).
I have snippets of code to test for ANSI compliance for the Fundamental through Collection protocols plus the ScaledDecimal protocol in Squeak.
I would like someone to volunteer to head up an ANSI compliant Squeak and work with Squeak Central on this project. I'd love to, but am not suited to the task.
Petr Novak (mailto:petr.novak@i.cz) also wants (separate wish):
A VM, which does all user interaction through the VNC protocol. This would enable fast ports to platforms where the VNC viewer is already available (some PDA etc), or to run Squeak remotely where there is no support for this, with multiple concurrent sessions (such as Windows).
Unicode in Squeak support and support for the various codepages, such as ISO-8859-xxx, Windows 12xx and possibly systems like Japanese, Korean and other specific codings.
something has been done for the Japanese language already (see the pages of the author of the Sharp Zaurus port of Squeak), although that uses some Japanese-only coding of the 16bit characters, but may be a good starting point. [hjh] See Multilingual Squeak. It is probably a good starting point.
Ted Nelson's Udanax (the open sources for the Xanadu Project) brought to Squeak. Looking at the ParcPlace fileouts, it seems that this would first require the temporary variables in code blocks fix that was mentioned earlier.
Jared (mailto:slake@punkass.com) would like to see:
OpenGL Extension, I'm a very big fan of OpenGL for it's platform independence with 2d and 3d graphics. I think it's the perfect 2d/3d graphics system for squeak.
I would do this myself but I'm not good with this kind of thing, wouldn't even know where to start.
Thomas Mahler would like to see:
Most people I showed Squeak told me "this is very nice but it LOOKS so strange". I think supporting one's most familiar look and feel (Like in Java Swing) would really support squeaks acceptance.
Douglas Brebner would like:
Numerical and symbolic algebra tools.
A tool for automatically generating wrappers to make pluggable primitives from dynamic libraries (SWIG may be the best bet here)
Improved telnet and an X server so I can get at my unix machines from any platform
a simulation framework to study complex systems (self-organized) multi-agent oriented (a Swarm-like !), with full-featured visualisation system, and the ability to use the full reflective power of squeak...
Help with VNC on Zaurus SL5000D with XI825 Wireless CF
cpate@cns.tstc.edu
I'm new to Smalltalk and especially Squeak. What I (perhaps from a more objective point of view than 'long time' Squeakers) want to say is: {Squeak needs a GUI Building tool !} Most people who take a look at Squeak say that indeed it is great, but it is boring to write Code for each typical widged and each window you're using in a 'normal' application. I think, if there was a GUI-Tool like the UI-Painter of Visul Works, more People would give Squeak a chance and try it out. I'm too unexperienced with Smalltalk to build something like that.
Chris Burkert
Greg Brooks would like:
A way to do rsh so I can execute command-line programs on the UNIX machines in my LAN, from cool Squeak GUI programs.
Backs to the cards used in Freecell, I want to implement Spider but I keep getting stuck on making the cards two sided.
Jeffrey Genung wants:
Squeek CAD/CAM for CNC machining. I want to be able to program my car (or turtle) and have the milling head move on an XYZ table.
Umur Ozkul wants to have a UML editor based SmallInterfaces. Only Interfaces should be represented in UML. Why? Let's discuss.
Ralph Boland wants:
I will be generating documentation for a Squeak project in Lyx from which I can generate .tex, .ps, and .pdf files.
I want to display the .ps files and .pdf files in a Squeak window when the user wants to read documentation
while the application is running. It would be cool if the .ps and .pdf files could be generated dynamically from the
.tex files before displaying them. A simple way to view a HTML file in a window would also be cool.
I have NO idea if this project is "moderate-sized".
Of course, if you're really ambitious, you could rewrite the entire Lyx project in Squeak :).
