Hi all,
I thought I'd also give you my thoughts on this. While in theory a replication of Apple's (actually SteelSkies') Cover Flow effect is possible to achieve in almost any development environment, with Squeak there are a couple of things to consider.
2-Dimensional movement is possible and it would also be processed faster, as there is no hardware-accelerated computation and rendering is involved. Although not the real Cover Flow, a .Mac-like caroussel (I hope I spelled that right) effect is achievable, and depending on the items that should be in the effect it would run more or less fast. As Squeak provides mechanisms for animating Morphs, this could be a possibility.
However, when it comes to 3-dimensional movement, it is a bit tricky on this one. The original Cover Flow by SteelSkies used OpenGL obviously for the effect. When Apple took it over, they ported the code into Quartz, and later Core Animation, which are obviously not available to other platforms itself the Mac OS X itself. So that said, OpenGL would be required for this effect. There is one implementation of OpenGL available for Squeak, which regrettably only runs under the Windows platform as it accesses DirectX if I remember that correctly. Another way to go is Balloon3D which is available through SqueakMap. This implementation allows for 3-dimensional computations in Squeak, and this is where it gets really tricky. For my project I have also tried to use this implementation. However, as Squeak runs in a virtual machine, this already puts a brake on the rendering speed. Also, all calls in the machine are translated into actual C instructions, and is then compiled at run time. This slows down the process more, and I would not recommend using this for high-profile 3D computations.
However there is the FFI package, which allows for 'connections' to other things in the OS platform, also OpenGL. This is the way Croquet did it, and when I tried it, it ran as fast as any other OpenGL application should. So my recommendation would be to have a look into Croquet and its base, to see how you can hook up computations directly with the OpenGL implementation of the underlying OS.
Then, in theory, you could create a music player that employs Cover Flow in Squeak, or a file browser with this function ;-)
That's just me...
Cheers
Marcus
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