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!

... and a Happy 2009 to everyone from me and my family. Presented by my XO-hugging USB men (who seem to have more memory capacity than me at times). Featuring a seriously tree-infested Etoys project, with snow (for those living south who cannot enjoy the white fluff this time of the year). And see you at 25C3 I hope!

Even with XO laptops readily available now there are quite a lot of reasons why one would want to emulate it on another machine. One being to hook up a projector. Unfortunately there are quite a number of hoops (*) one has to jump through to make it work. Anyway, I made a virtual machine that allows me to emulate the XO in VMWare on my Mac, running Sugar in the XO's native 1200x900 resolution, scaled down to a nice physical size in a window on my regular screen (fullscreen works, too). Sound works (even Tam Tam), Browse works (so networking is good), and after setting a working Jabber server I do see other XOs in the neighborhood view (Chat worked fine). Camera and mic are half working (Measure crashes, Record shows blank picture, but reportedly does record video), and a "Sugar restart" does not actually restart Sugar, but apart from that it seems fully functional, and much nicer than the emulations I had used to date. Click to see actual screenshots (calibrated to mat...

I went to Brussels last weekend, meeting with folks from OLPC Europe, OLPC Boston, and some other European grassroots (me representing OLPC Germany e.V. ). We mostly discussed how to implement the new Give-1-Get-1 program as well as Give-many  here in Europe. Some notes are available. And, while sitting together at a nice Cafe on Sunday I made this little Etoys project to celebrate OLPC Europe. Just click here if you are on an XO or have the Squeakland  plugin installed (as everyone should of course). For those who were there and took the huge file home on their USB drives - this is a fixed version that does not keep growing indefinitely while animating. For the Etoyers out there - if you put a copy of a player in one of its own variables repeatedly, this creates an evergrowing "linked list" of player copies. Bad idea. Reset the variable first (by assigning dot for example) then do the copy: see my example.

The extensive OLPC article by c't magazine is now available online in both original German and an English translation . It's a thorough review (they had a B1 machine) with some interesting photographs in it, like the Squeak Etoys screen in reflective and backlight modes with microscopic images revealing the working of the XO's incredible LCD.