Smalltalk › Squeak › Squeak - Dev

Poking at Sophie

_‹ Previous Topic Next Topic _›

Classic

List

Threaded

6 messages Options

johnmci

Poking at Sophie

Some people were asking me where Sophie is this month.

Well a few days ago our web group in NY made the web site accessible
to the public.

http://www.sophieproject.org/

People are welcome to look around, register, download the software,
check things out etc.
However in true smalltalk fashion we are just about to refactor and
rewrite the entire TextNode logic which will break
books you create today.

On going we do have a mandate not to cause this upheaval but now that
we understand the text/style problems better we've decided to
break things on purpose when we refactor, and unfortunately manpower
constraints prevent us from doing the backward compatible dance at
this time.

--
========================================================================
===
John M. McIntosh <[hidden email]>
Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd. http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com
========================================================================
===

johnmci

Re: Poking at Sophie

Ralph asked me why couldn't someone write a converter to convert older books.
In fact one of the goals of the project is to address the issue of carrying forward the book storage over the course of 100 years.
Thus some care has been taken to serialize books out as XML, and enable the usage of different XML readers/definitions when
reading/writing a book. So this is not a issue of poorly designed storage representation, rather it's a manpower issue, where we (the sophie team)
does not have the time needed to create a converter, which wouldn't stop someone in the community from doing it.

On 11/6/06, John M McIntosh <[hidden email]> wrote:

Some people were asking me where Sophie is this month.

karl-8

Re: Poking at Sophie

John M McIntosh skrev:

> Ralph asked me why couldn't someone write a converter to convert older
> books.
> In fact one of the goals of the project is to address the issue of
> carrying forward the book storage over the course of 100 years.
> Thus some care has been taken to serialize books out as XML, and
> enable the usage of different XML readers/definitions when
> reading/writing a book. So this is not a issue of poorly designed
> storage representation, rather it's a manpower issue, where we (the
> sophie team)
> does not have the time needed to create a converter, which wouldn't
> stop someone in the community from doing it.

Are there any example books to download ?

Karl

>
>
>
> On 11/6/06, *John M McIntosh* <[hidden email]
> <mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:
>
> Some people were asking me where Sophie is this month.
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>

Simon Michael

Re: Poking at Sophie

Thanks for the link John. Did you know that the .exe starts up fine with
wine ? (tested on ubuntu edgy x386). Pretty neat! I wished for some
extensive help, no doubt it will come.

johnmci

Re: Poking at Sophie

Ah, well I doubt the quicktime support works tho. From time to time
some have tried Sophie under Unix and made some changes for that
platformbut the Sophie team isn't explicitly supporting the platform
at this time. Again the quicktime support is an issue, however we do
have a decision pointwhere you pick the media player so right now we
choice between the quicktime player with plugin, Quicktime without
plugin, the mpeg plugin, straight audio/ no video, and the AIFF and
other obscure sound players within Squeak depending on the platform
support and the media type. To support quicktime or many of the media
types it supports, say MPEG4, you would need to plugin say an FFI
interface to mPlayer or something.

On 7-Nov-06, at 11:41 PM, Simon Michael wrote:

> Thanks for the link John. Did you know that the .exe starts up fine
> with wine ? (tested on ubuntu edgy x386). Pretty neat! I wished for
> some extensive help, no doubt it will come.
>
>

--
========================================================================
===
John M. McIntosh <[hidden email]>
Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd. http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com
========================================================================
===

Aaron Reichow

Re: Poking at Sophie

In reply to this post by johnmci

John, Ralph, and anyone else-

I know it isn't quite what you are talking about with an old-style book to Sophie, it might still be of interest to some who are find just reading an ebook a much more pressing issue than pulling these older books into the brave new world of Sophie. Towards that end, I've begun work on an ebook reader along the lines of µBook for WinCE, JustReader or FBReader for Linux. It won't be released for a while, but reading ebooks is one of things I do most on my PDA. I've read maybe 200 books over the last 4 years, and all but maybe 5 of them I read on my PDA. I should be doing it in Squeak! :D

Regards,

Aaron

On Nov 7, 2006, at 1:47 PM, John M McIntosh wrote:

Ralph asked me why couldn't someone write a converter to convert older books.
In fact one of the goals of the project is to address the issue of carrying forward the book storage over the course of 100 years.
Thus some care has been taken to serialize books out as XML, and enable the usage of different XML readers/definitions when
reading/writing a book. So this is not a issue of poorly designed storage representation, rather it's a manpower issue, where we (the sophie team)
does not have the time needed to create a converter, which wouldn't stop someone in the community from doing it.

On 11/6/06, John M McIntosh <[hidden email]> wrote:
Some people were asking me where Sophie is this month.