Squeak as HyperCard

["Ian Bicking" <bickiia@earlham.edu>]

I saw a posting on the Squeak <http://www.squeak.org> mailing 
list that made me think about this.  I'd quote the mail, but the 
archives are broken.  It doesn't really matter... it was a comment 
made in passing.

I'm not entirely sure what the core developers of Squeak are trying 
to do, but the more I think about it the more I'm pretty sure they are 
trying to make something like HyperCard/HyperStudio, only a lot 
better.

They've been working on Morphic quite a bit, which is a widget 
system that is highly visual -- you drag the buttons around, inspect 
them, etc., and there is no code generation but what you create 
really *is* the interface, not a template for the interface.  Anyway, 
it's very concrete, very dynamic, and has some spiffy features.  All 
the multimedia features you'd expect and desire, like fancy text-
shaping, polygons, image editting, etc.

Now, the system is a long ways from being ready to use with 
actual children or the programming-illiterate.  I don't know when this 
is going to change -- it has everything to make a pretty neat 
program, but isn't packaged in a very sanitized way.  A lot of the 
underlying Smalltalk comes through in unexpected places, which 
probably isn't what you want to happen.

Outside of the core developers (who all work at Disney, and many 
of whom have some background in education) there doesn't seem 
to be much interest in this direction by the Squeak community.  
Except sanitizing Squeak for distribution, which interests a lot of 
people but not particularly the Disney people.  Funny that.

I thought I'd present it as a potential direction.



--
Ian Bicking <bickiia@earlham.edu>