Dr. Vanessa Freudenberg

I'm proud to announce SqueakJS, a new Squeak VM that runs on Javascript: SqueakJS project page It was inspired by Dan's JSqueak/Potato VM for Java, and similarly only runs the old Squeak 2.2 mini.image for now. But I developed it inside the Lively Kernel, which allowed me to make a nice UI to look inside the VM (in addition to all the Lively tools): It represents regular Squeak objects as Javascript objects with direct object references. SmallIntegers are represented as Javascript numbers, there is no need for tagging. Instance variables and indexable fields are held in a single array named "pointers". Word and byte binary objects store their data in arrays named "bytes" or "words". CompiledMethod instances have both "pointers" and "bytes". Float instances are not stored as two words as in Squeak, but have a single "float" property that stores the actual number (and the words are generated on-the-fly w...

The Raspberry Pi is a cute little computer. Quite cheap at $35, you plug in USB keyboard+mouse and a TV as monitor. And it is surprisingly capable, even for running 3D games. One particularly interesting game is Minecraft: Pi Edition . As in other Minecraft versions, the main goal is to create a world. But unlike other versions, you can not only use the tools provided by the game, you can make your own tools! That's because it comes with a programming interface. The Minecaft world is made of little cubes, and you normally place or remove these blocks by hand, one after another. This is fun, but for larger structures also quite cumbersome. For example, this rainbow here might take a long time to construct manually: But I did not make the rainbow by hand. I programmed it, using the Smalltalk programming language. It's just these dozen lines of code in the Squeak programming environment: Squeak is already installed on the Raspberry Pi, because Scratch was made in Squea...

SJ brought a hand-assembled XO-3 prototype to the OLPC Community Summit in San Francisco (mass production only starts when someone puts in a large-scale order), and of course I tried to run Etoys on it. It's pre-installed (as on all XOs) and worked right out of the box. I was able to paint and drag objects, but since there is no right-click support yet there was no halo to bring up a new viewer. Also, touch targets are rather small for my adult-sized hands, and since there are no hover events, some features don't work correctly (as we found out with the iPad version two years ago). So more work is needed, as well as for the XO-4 which has a multitouch screen in addition to a keyboard and touchpad. Help welcome :)

First post this year, yikes! The last one was about ESUG 2010 in Barcelona, now I just returned from ESUG 2011 in Edinburgh. While I was there, a package with the shiny new XO-1.75 prototype arrived. Incredibly, the pre-installed Etoys simply worked! Never mind the change in processor architecture, the Fedora folks have done a great job compiling the Squeak VM for ARM and so Etoys just works. Of course that's just as it should be, but it's still awesome. And e.g. Squeakland's own Etoys-To-Go would not have worked, as it only includes binaries for Intel-compatible processors. Another great addition is a 3-axis accelerometer. The Linux kernel's driver exposes it as a file at /sys/devices/platform/lis3lv02d/position . Gotta love the unix design of exposing devices as files. All it took to make this usable from an Etoys project was just an object with ax, ay, and az variables that get set with one simple textual script: Another simple script can use this to control a b...

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!