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I much appreciate how far the Etoys support has come in squeak 5.3. I'm very much a 'high level' user of squeak and always found Etoys as sort of supercharged Hypercard and enjoy using it in that way. While exploring the unofficial updates in the 'back door squeak' in Etoys 5, I found a very useful morphic option called 'Hand Me Sketch of This Morph', which creates a bitmap copy of the object complete with transparencies if it's a non-square graphic and places it at the mouse cursor. It was never officially released into Etoys, but I found I used it quite a lot in doing graphics work and it helped speed up screen updates for more intensive graphics stuff I was doing since moving around a bitmap is much faster than drawing a bunch of, say, overlapping polygons and other geometric objects in which a lot of the drawing to update those things is all for naught: if graphic object overlaps another graphic object, they're both drawn completely, and thus moving them wastes a lot of drawing time. If they're not going to change but be moving around the screen, one could contain them into a playfield which, as I understand it, keeps the playfield 'data' but actually moves it by copying the playfield as a simple graphic. All this said, once I'm happy with a graphic, I tend to make a bitmap sketch out of it and handling the transparencies of grabbing a sketch takes a couple of tedious steps. "Hand me a sketch of this morph" was a huge time saver in this respect and quickly freed up cycles (is that the right way to say it?) for things that don't have to do with drawing a lot of objects.
I guess what I'm getting at is that I'm making a case for this method from the Etoys prototype trunk to be added somewhere down the line into Squeak and hope that this can happen. If I was more Smalltalk savvy, I'd add it into Montecello or something. I understand my uses for Squeak are probably niche and such feature would be seen as obscure, but I suppose it never hurts to bring attention to it and ask. :)
Thanks, Squeak crew.
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