Dr. Vanessa Freudenberg

This year's conference logo was designed by my good friend Patty Gadegast . I just returned from the European Smalltalk User Group conference in Barcelona, Spain. It was a really nice experience. There was too much going on to report everything here, so I will just pick some favorites. Photo by Bert Freudenberg The event was hosted by citilab  Cornellà. It started off with a Camp Smalltalk over the weekend. I already met quite a few people there. I couldn't mingle as much as I hoped to because I had to get the first Etoys 4.1 release candidate out of the door: Photo by Adriaan van Os Close by was "Yokohama Wok", a Japanese/Spanish restaurant with the best all-you-can-eat buffet imaginable. You could have everything from freshly cut ham to sushi, grilled steak or seafood, bread, pasta, rice, fruits, cake, desserts. Photo by Bert Freudenberg I talked to Stef (president of ESUG) and gave him a Squeak Etoys button , which he ended up wearing the whole wee...

In preparation of making Etoys work on the recently announced OLPC tablet , I ported it to the iPad. Here is a video —read on below for some details: This might look exciting, and it certainly is, but it feels actually a lot more clunky than it looks. You may have noticed the little target circles I added whenever a finger touches the screen. That's to know where exactly the finger hit. It's really hard to hit anything, took me a while of training to hit the colorful halo handle buttons on first try. We really need to redesign the user interface before giving this into the hands of kids ... But for now, some technical details:  John McIntosh  ported the Squeak Virtual Machine to Apple's touch-based OS last year (source available at  isqueak.org ). I modified it slightly to enable multi-touch and keyboard input. Also, I rewrote his code to deal with touch events in Squeak, and added multi-touch handling to Morphic. Fortunately, Morphic was designed to handle multip...

Milan just started a blog describing how to write activities in Squeak, see his first post . There are already a few of these, most notably the games by Robert Hirschfeld's students at the University of Potsdam, Germany. But so far the process is only documented in mailing list posts. Way to go, Milan!