New software developed by Bernat Romagosa, member of the Smalltalk.cat group. Scaena is a technical rider designer for musicians, sound engineers or anyone involved in the process of organizing a music event. Scaena is built on top of Iliad and running on a Pharo 1.3 image, and it is still on an alpha phase.
Ludus, a new html5 game framework on top of amber, try it! http://asmalltalkbytheseaside.com
Besides, someone run Scat on CogDroid (cog VM for Android). Announced here, translation here. Awesome.
Also, S4A goes to NY! Don Dagen has shown his Arduino K'nex robot project at the NY Maker Faire.
Nice, isn't it?
New deadline for ESUG 2011 8th Innovation Technology Awards
August 15, 2011
Visit ESUG 2011 8th Innovation Technology Awards web site for complete information...
ESUG 2011 8th Innovation Technology Awards
Have you written innovative Smalltalk? The developers of any Smalltalk-based software can enter by submitting a 3-5min video of their software. Entrants demo their systems in a session at the end of Monday August 22nd 2011, after which the conference attendees vote. (A vote consists in providing a sorted list of 3 preferred pieces of software.)
The top 3 teams with the most innovative software will receive, respectively, 500 Euros, 300 Euros and 200 Euros. The results are announced in the Awards ceremony that is held during the social event.
Applicants should provide the following information on the conference registration server. Once you have registered your personal info, an "Awards" menu allows submitting your software. You can provide this information when you first register, or login again later and update your details.
Info to provide:
Deadline: 30th of july August 15
Any Smalltalker can apply (students, companies, ...). The presented piece of code/software should be written in Smalltalk or directly support Smalltalk (e.g. Smalltalk VM). All Smalltalk dialects are accepted. The applicant should own the copyright/copyleft of presented code or at least be the official representative of the copyright/copyleft owner. The software should be available on-line for evaluation (time-limited evaluation version, demo version, free for non-commercial use ...).
Communiqué on the recent discovery of our clandestine operations
STATEMENT
We believe there is a conspiracy going on all over the universe, evil forces are constantly fighting to take down great Smalltalk projects and port them to other languages.
In a quest against such demonic plots, a couple of us started a confidential mission to rescue the last of these endangered projects, namely Scratch.
Yesterday, our secret operations were accidentally discovered and published on the Internet, which is what compelled us to express our intentions and openly clarify our objectives.
MOTIVATIONS
It has been announced that Scratch is to be ported to Flash, which we consider to not be a very good decision for several reasons, including: There is no open source fully working implementation of the language, so it will be impossible to freely develop Scratch modifications The previous would endanger the continuity of projects to which we are firmly tied, such as S4A or BYOB Flash is not working (and never will) in many embedded devices If the aim of porting the project was to get it to work on the web, we consider flash to be one the worst possible choices, over javascript or even HTML5 Scratch is a pretty massive project featuring zillions of lines of code. Rewriting it from scratch (pun intended) is gonna feel wrong to many people who spent sleepless hours contributing to it
It is indeed true that Scratch is implemented in a very old version of Squeak, which makes modifying it a very difficult, tedious and annoying job, but we consider that dumping Smalltalk for good is not the solution to this problem.
CONSIDERATIONS
Since there are modern implementations of Smalltalk that pretty much overcome all these issues, we took the decision of trying to port the whole project into one of them. We considered Squeak and Pharo to be the two only valid candidates, for obvious compatibility and licensing reasons.
Being Pharo our main working environment, and because of its development tools being the ones in which we are by far the most productive, this is the dialect that was chosen.
CURRENT SITUATION
Scat is the name of the Scratch port for Pharo. Pretty much everything is working, check out this wiki entry:
http://code.google.com/p/scat/wiki/History
Demos: http://code.google.com/p/scat/wiki/ShowCase
FUTURE STEPS
We are not doing this just to have Scratch working in Pharo. At some point, we intend to re-engineer some of the awfully architectured parts of the project and make it modular enough to be able to extract certain parts of it for other pieces of software.
Imagine having a Scratch block palette and execution engine to have children (and not only children) make awesome music with, or visualizations, or scientific simulations, or even websites!
In short, imagine being able to bring the easiness of programming with Scratch to any possible field of computing!
THAT is our goal.
WHAT YOU CAN DO
Oh sure, please come and help us! There are three levels of implication in which you can be of great use: