Squeak People diary for JohnMcIntosh

7 Jun 2007

Thu, 07 Jun 2007 06:27:52 -0700

I pushed out the new os-x browser plugins on squeakland.org, they silently lurk on the download page now. The Sophie edit logic rewrite is continuing, a new internal build was pushed out today. The Sophie Project received an XO laptop earlier in the week, alas I've not personally had a chance to play with it yet, lurks at another Sophie team members house at the moment. Oh and the Sophie Reader application went out as an internal build for comment. So lots going on, like an IRC chanel sophie-dev, just a bit hidden from public view at the moment. (mind links etc lurk on the Sophie project mailing list).

16 May 2007

Wed, 16 May 2007 22:28:18 -0700

Sophie is up to release 5 now, http://www.sophieproject.org We are hard at work refactoring the edit logic, and working on changes for OLPC.

7 Mar 2007

Wed, 07 Mar 2007 10:51:47 -0700

Sophie Release Candidate 2 ships. So some sleep is due. I'll note this release contains quicktime graphics import/exporter FFI logic to enable us to make Squeak Forms from anything a Quicktime graphics importers is written for, and also then allows us to quickly stream out PNG, or other formats. Plus we pushed out the feature to enable you to save books to a Server, then read, edit, and save back to the Server. Our textual node storage subsystem rewrite went well, problems with Styles went away, but Tim is heard to mutter about how hard the problem of pasting random clumps of styled text into random places in the text trees and then doing the right thing....

For a week Michael and I poked at font rendering, reducing it's cost by nearly 70%, and I spent an entire weekend taking a cloud of thousands of Tweak messages about font list updates and reducing it to the 3 actual messages that were required to be sent. As a side effect our splash screen now flashes up then is gone, because it was staying up only as tweak grinded thru thousands of signals...

12 Jan 2007

Fri, 12 Jan 2007 07:37:02 -0700

2007 already, way too much time in Sophie. Over christmas the Sophie team refactored the entire node storage, composing, and positioning logic. Not much time for holidays. We hope to push out these changes out in early Feb with a 1.0 release perhaps in march.

A bit of time during this period was taken to work on the Scratch VM, an offering from MIT media Labs which is based on the Squeak VM. The Scratch folks were using a old VM, so I updated them to the 3.8.14 version so they got macintel support, plus added the mac host menu support to the scratch image so they get better menus on the mac.

Earlier in the Fall I rewrote the entire browser plugin interface for os-x carbon and rebuilt the VM to run as a headless application, thanks to Viewpoints Research Inc for funding this. The old plugin logic was tossed and replaced by some new code originally from Apple to enable proper MacIntel support for netscape plugins. This new plugin allows you to launch multiple squeak VMs from safari or Firefox supporting the netscape browser plugin API. A bit of fun since I had to research how to share the quartz drawing surface between the browser and the Squeak VM without moving lots of data. Virtual Memory mapping to the rescue.

I also rewrote with some help from Impara the printJob plugin to work with MacIntel and use Quartz for the drawing surface, plus with some funding from Avi compiled the Curl plugin for os-x.

Other VM changes provide mouse button mapping to assist people who have mega-button-mice cope with reality, plus compiling in Exupery, mind feedback/testing on Exupery's SUnits and macintel has been rare/non-existent.

17 Jul 2006

Mon, 17 Jul 2006 04:06:59 -0700

Apparently demos for more funding for Sophie went well, right now we're resting a bit, but having to prep for a version to give to the USC Annenberg Center for New Media http://www.annenberg.edu/projects/so they can teach a course in the August timeframe. Ya, lots more to do.

I'll note I pushed a mac carbon vm 3.8.12b5U out earlier in june to support the loading of overriding frameworks to fix some issues with borken software that ships with 10.4.6 which affected Croquet.

A zillion hours of work on Sophie prevents other things from happening, such as the Exupery port, and the rewrite of the browser plugin.

19 May 2006

Fri, 19 May 2006 08:34:54 -0700

Sophie is coming, http://www.futureofthebook.org/sophie/files/sophie_beethoven_demo.mov

Way too busy to look at other things, mind we did a big push in April to get a version of the VM 3.8.12b4U out the door that provides identical math functionality across platforms to support Croquet.

Did anyone realize that if you take the URI http://movies.apple.com/movies/us/apple/getamac_ads1/networking_480x376.mov
and import that as a *link to* into Sophie, then grab from the Movie's pane in the Sophie Resource Manager and drag to page why you get to play that movie without paying the cost of importing and storing the media? Likely not, but you can.

Lastly where is that extended clipboard support so we can grab RTF from the clipboard and import into Sophie's RTF reader, done and testing, but must push that out, likely in 3.8.13

22 Mar 2006

Wed, 22 Mar 2006 09:25:20 -0700

Mmm way too much time working on Sophie. However along with Sophie I've been hard at work at porting Squeak to MacIntel and Unix File names. These are now available at the 3.8.11bx VM level. However this evening I was informed that Croquet does not work play nice with FFI on Mac and MacIntel. The Mac powerpc problem is fixed, still looking at the MacIntel issue. Oh and btw a rewrite of the Browser plugin is underway to enable Croquet Open/GL in Safari.

Lastly if time permits and it's not much more work that a compile or three, I'll provide a Exupery VM for MacIntel.

20 Jun 2004

Sun, 20 Jun 2004 08:57:51 -0700

TIme flies (where did march/April/May go?).

I posted a new mac VM 3.7.4b1. Has Tim's VMMaker improvements for external primitive call logic performance gains.

28 Feb 2004

Sat, 28 Feb 2004 06:11:02 -0700

I recalled I hadn't visited the MPEG plugin for a bit and realized a day ago it hadn't been compiled under GCC 3.3 with Apple's -fast compiler optimization and certainly not upgraded to the latest XCode project file. A few hours of work solved those issues and I posted a new plugin to the internet. It's a bit faster, however last summer some tuning I did improved performance quite a bit so you should really check which version you are using on the powerpc and consider upgrading.

26 Feb 2004

Thu, 26 Feb 2004 07:29:03 -0700

Spent a few hours over the last few days tweaking the accufont's accuny font to ensure the widths match the Squeak 'New York' font. Although the Accufont in question was modeled after the Apple 'New York' font from the late 80's, it appears the Squeak 'New York' font is a derived version with tweaking. Thus the original port of accuny to Squeak rightly generated some complaints. A bit of work with the morphic font editor (http://bgaertner.gmxhome.de/MorphicFontEditor.htm) and some coding that drives the morphics & model and validates the results means one now can migrate to the accufonts using the first three sizes of 'New York' without enduring tears. This will go into 'update stream' in a few days after some public comment.

Migration from the encumbered Apple 'New York' font in Squeak again has kicked off discussion of fonts, although it appears this time FreeType might come to the rescue since rumor has it that it has worked it's way around the patent issue.