Smalltalk › Pharo › Pharo Smalltalk Developers

Pharo on iOS w/ faster graphics

_‹ Previous Topic Next Topic _›

Classic

List

Threaded

4 messages Options

jrick

Pharo on iOS w/ faster graphics

Hi everyone,

I've been lurking a little while here and thought I would jump in to see if Pharo would be appropriate for what I want to do.

First, here's a little background about myself. I'm an academic researcher in human-computer interaction and educational technology. I've been programming in Smalltalk since the early days of Squeak. For those who remember, I wrote Swiki. I'm now doing work on multi-touch interfaces, such as interactive tabletops and tablets. There's a huge difference between designing interfaces for mouse / keyboard and designing for multi-touch. My current research interests are in creating interfaces that are optimized for the latter, rather than the former. Smalltalk is a great environment for that, because you really can rebuild the GUI from the ground up. I've gone ahead and worked off the work that John McIntosh did on iSqueak to create several applications for iPad.

I'm thinking of transitioning from Squeak to Pharo as the current development state of Pharo is a bit cleaner than Squeak. I'm glad to see that there is some interest in getting Pharo on iOS (though there do seem to be problem). I'm not an Objective-C or C expert, so I wouldn't be good at getting the VM to work, but I would be able to go from there to creating some interesting widgets, frameworks, and apps that I could share with the community.

One major hurdle I see in my work is that Morphic is just too slow on iPads. While I have been able to optimize the speed of my applications to have them work on Morphic, it is a lot of extra work and I may eventually get to a point where it won't work for what I need it to do. Is there some sort of magic bullet for addressing this? Cairo? Does anyone have any recommendations for addressing this inside Pharo? I'm not interested in 3D interfaces, but rather fast 2D interfaces. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

Jeff

--
Jochen "Jeff" Rick, Ph.D.
http://www.je77.com/
Skype ID: jochenrick

philippeback

Re: Pharo on iOS w/ faster graphics

Hey cool!

Morphic could eat less by just reducing the frame rate and also use simple forms and pens to draw things.

Also we have opengl under and could do a lot of interesting optimizations through plugins.

I am onboard to work with you on that. Once the VM is built properly that is.

I am currently writing an app for the iPad and the touch UI is really sometging different indeed.

Pharo on iPad has the potential to be a killer app for development. A dynabook come true. Paired with a bluetooth keyboard on portrait position like with the zagg I use it looks like an alto of 2012!

Le 27 mars 2012 14:32, "J.F. Rick" <[hidden email]> a écrit :

Hi everyone,

I've been lurking a little while here and thought I would jump in to see if Pharo would be appropriate for what I want to do.

First, here's a little background about myself. I'm an academic researcher in human-computer interaction and educational technology. I've been programming in Smalltalk since the early days of Squeak. For those who remember, I wrote Swiki. I'm now doing work on multi-touch interfaces, such as interactive tabletops and tablets. There's a huge difference between designing interfaces for mouse / keyboard and designing for multi-touch. My current research interests are in creating interfaces that are optimized for the latter, rather than the former. Smalltalk is a great environment for that, because you really can rebuild the GUI from the ground up. I've gone ahead and worked off the work that John McIntosh did on iSqueak to create several applications for iPad.

I'm thinking of transitioning from Squeak to Pharo as the current development state of Pharo is a bit cleaner than Squeak. I'm glad to see that there is some interest in getting Pharo on iOS (though there do seem to be problem). I'm not an Objective-C or C expert, so I wouldn't be good at getting the VM to work, but I would be able to go from there to creating some interesting widgets, frameworks, and apps that I could share with the community.

One major hurdle I see in my work is that Morphic is just too slow on iPads. While I have been able to optimize the speed of my applications to have them work on Morphic, it is a lot of extra work and I may eventually get to a point where it won't work for what I need it to do. Is there some sort of magic bullet for addressing this? Cairo? Does anyone have any recommendations for addressing this inside Pharo? I'm not interested in 3D interfaces, but rather fast 2D interfaces. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

Jeff

--
Jochen "Jeff" Rick, Ph.D.
http://www.je77.com/
Skype ID: jochenrick

Stéphane Ducasse

Re: Pharo on iOS w/ faster graphics

In reply to this post by jrick

Hi jeff

welcome :)

> First, here's a little background about myself. I'm an academic researcher in human-computer interaction and educational technology. I've been programming in Smalltalk since the early days of Squeak. For those who remember, I wrote Swiki.

I do :)

> I'm now doing work on multi-touch interfaces, such as interactive tabletops and tablets. There's a huge difference between designing interfaces for mouse / keyboard and designing for multi-touch. My current research interests are in creating interfaces that are optimized for the latter, rather than the former. Smalltalk is a great environment for that, because you really can rebuild the GUI from the ground up. I've gone ahead and worked off the work that John McIntosh did on iSqueak to create several applications for iPad.

Just that you know we started to clean the event handling because we especially want to support the extension
of event handling. Note that if you have enhancements please send them because we always want to improve our infrastructure.

> I'm thinking of transitioning from Squeak to Pharo as the current development state of Pharo is a bit cleaner than Squeak.

a lot more :)

> I'm glad to see that there is some interest in getting Pharo on iOS (though there do seem to be problem). I'm not an Objective-C or C expert, so I wouldn't be good at getting the VM to work, but I would be able to go from there to creating some interesting widgets, frameworks, and apps that I could share with the community.

ESUG supported esteban and hilaire for pushing the iPad handling.

> One major hurdle I see in my work is that Morphic is just too slow on iPads. While I have been able to optimize the speed of my applications to have them work on Morphic, it is a lot of extra work and I may eventually get to a point where it won't work for what I need it to do.

We should optimize it. We hope that by cleaning we will get there.

> Is there some sort of magic bullet for addressing this? Cairo? Does anyone have any recommendations for addressing this inside Pharo? I'm not interested in 3D interfaces, but rather fast 2D interfaces. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Jeff
>
> --
> Jochen "Jeff" Rick, Ph.D.
> http://www.je77.com/
> Skype ID: jochenrick

Marcus Denker-4

Re: Pharo on iOS w/ faster graphics

In reply to this post by jrick

On Mar 27, 2012, at 6:35 PM, Stéphane Ducasse wrote:
>
>> First, here's a little background about myself. I'm an academic researcher in human-computer interaction and educational technology. I've been programming in Smalltalk since the early days of Squeak. For those who remember, I wrote Swiki.
>
> I do :)
me too. I think we even met a loong time ago... at ACM1 or OOPSLA...

>> Is there some sort of magic bullet for addressing this? Cairo? Does anyone have any recommendations for addressing this inside Pharo? I'm not interested in 3D interfaces, but rather fast 2D interfaces. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
>>

I think that Athens will allow us to speed up things... Athens is a new rendering canvas that can use Cairo or OpenGL as a backend.

http://computeradventures.wordpress.com/2012/03/07/athens-a-first-babysteps/

But of course there is a lot of work to be done... (e.g. porting it to run on the iphone... porting NativeBoost to ARM ;-))

--
Marcus Denker -- http://marcusdenker.de