Posted on September 10, 2007 at 8:29 pm
Squeak, with Aero built-in.
Alright. I know what you’re asking right now: What is Squeak? It is not easily explained. At the end of the day, it is a development environment. Anything in Squeak is entirely coded in Smalltalk, even Squeak itself is written in Smalltalk. To be able to program in Squeak, you will require the virtual machine and the official Squeak image, which can all be acquired for free including the source from the Squeak headquarters. Once you have done something, you can either save your creation on your harddrive and then publish it so that others can import it, or copy the image to another machine, which also runs a completely different operating system, and it will run bit-identically. So in other words, Squeak represents the most portable developing environment ever written, as it is able to run on 96% on all hardware available on the planet. This includes mobile devices. Smalltalk-80 is a programming languages created by Alan Kay, who revolutionized development of software with Smalltalk, which is entirely object-oriented, everything is an object, there is no distinction between private or public classes as in C++. Even more better, it is more plain English than some weird C++ syntax.
The Squeak icon in Mac OS X
Even more cool: incremental compiling. Huh? Alright. This means, as soon as you change or add any code inside the environment, it is ready to run. Meaning, it is compiled… boom. No linking against libraries, no compiling with GCC or the like. Type, save, boom. Nice eh?
If you want to know what sorts of things are possible to date with Squeak, check these out:
OpenCroquet - 3D application creation framework for Squeak
Seaside - Most probably the most advanced web development framework on the planet
Sophie - The future of the eBook
Well. The only thing I didn’t like about Squeak, was its look. This is:
Not very nice eh? Thought so. It serves its purpose, no doubt about that, but it doesn’t look very well. People want eye-candy, and I’m also one of these persons, I admit that. Luckily, after long search on the web I found widgets on SqueakSource.com, which upgrade the entire look of the environment. To get the Vista look:
1) Download this file.
2) Open up your Squeak image
3) Inside Squeak, open a new file list and navigate to the folder where you downloaded the file from step 1
4) Click “load”
5) This will take a good moment. When everything is done, you should already see a taskbar on the bottom!
6) To make the windows look nicer, open a new Workspace, and type:
UIThemeVistary beCurrent.
then hit Ctrl+D.
…and boom!
You should get something like:
Except for the wallpaper. You can use any wallpaper by opening a file list, selecting a supported image file (jpg in my case) and click “wallpaper”.
So… nice one eh? I like it better that way, and now I’ll have more fun learning Squeak and Smalltalk. Boom.
