Squeak Etoys running on first prototype display, OLPC offices

http://piumarta.com/photos/olpc/

Hi Markus -

> Guess that they are in a really early stage, and want to get some  
> more things settled before going public.

Well you got a peek at work that is going on *right now* (literally) at
the OLPC offices.

> But I wonder, what kinds of projects and tutorials will be on, and if  
> there will be any localization efforts for e.g. Nigeria or if English  
> is ok there.

The way I understand it, all of it needs to be localized for the
deployment. However, we expect to work with native speakers for that.

> I also wonder about the the future of Etoys for the 2Be1 - will the  
> next processors be fast enough to support Tweak - or will Tweak be  
> tweaked to support the current one?

Our immediate goal is to make eToys run well on the current hardware
generation and that's looking good so far. We decided to go with the
"old" eToys version just because that meant we could concentrate on
dealing with those aspects that are specific to the hardware and
software platform - i.e., optimizing a few things, making a nice
integration with the sugar framework, providing more examples and
documentation.

> Or will VP continue to enhance and tidy Etoys1? Tin Lizzie seems the  
> way to go....when can we start to play with Tin Lizzie?

As soon as I find a bit of time to tidy up a release ;-)

> Are we in "competition mode" -- are there signs that the python  
> (Ruby?) communities come up with a decent system to substitute the  
> Squeak-Etoys version?

I wouldn't call it "competition" - we try to encourage more educational
content and other languages only add to our vision and aren't in
conflict with it.

> The main question are: Can we help? How?

There is always a bunch of issues that we could use help with. For
example, if you know someone who could work out Thai and Arabic script
setting in Squeak that would be quite helpful. Alternatively, finding
some time to work out a Pango integration with Squeak would help (since
we could leverage the work done by OLPC for the languages that we don't
support). Oh, and making Squeak IPv6 ready would be helpful, too (looks
like OLPC will use IPv6). Also, it looks like OLPC will support CSound
and we don't have support for that either (but it'd be great if we could
just use the existing MIDI interface for it, etc).

Other than that, I think we have our bases covered so far. There is a
bunch of VM stuff needed (Ian is working on that), Sugar integration
(Bert is doing that) and a ton of UI fixes and tweaks (Yoshiki, Takashi,
and Scott are working on that). We're also trying to work out some nicer
tutorials (Takashi and Ted) and trying to get tutorials and
documentation in order (Kim and Alan). I'm sure everybody could need
some help here or there but unfortunately we're working on tight
schedules (there is an october deadline looming over us which is the
immediate goal to which at least the initial integration and VM parts
need to be done).

> p.s. I forgot to mention and to thank Takashi Yamamiya San, who is  
> helping Yoshiki and Co. with the Etoys Part.

You also forgot to mention Scott and Ted, and Takashi is doing a lot
more than just "helping" with eToys ;-)

Cheers,
   - Andreas

Hi Andreas,
>
>> Guess that they are in a really early stage, and want to get some  
>> more things settled before going public.
>
> Well you got a peek at work that is going on *right now*  
> (literally) at the OLPC offices.
:-) Great news, looking forward to it.
>
>> Are we in "competition mode" -- are there signs that the python  
>> (Ruby?) communities come up with a decent system to substitute  
>> the  Squeak-Etoys version?
>
> I wouldn't call it "competition" - we try to encourage more  
> educational content and other languages only add to our vision and  
> aren't in conflict with it.
Yeah, right, with the open document format in place it should be  
quite transparent with which language/env the etoys are created.

Did anyone of you consider not to store the docs/specs of Etoys  
statically, but the commands to recreate the docs?
I am imagining sth like "Create standard playfield at 100@100 called  
SolarSystem / Change color of SolarSystem to black/ Drop standard  
ellipse into SolarSystem called sun/... and so on.
Sth. like a human readable prevayler.
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/wa-objprev/

Having a decent editor for this high level changesets (to eliminate  
all the bad trials) could create tutorials, etc out of it too. I  
think that Ted worked in that direction already. According to
http://www.csounds.com/manual/html/OSCNetwork.html (what's in a  
name...;-)
csound comes with osc, and I happen to have written an osc-client and  
server for squeak found on Squeakmap, maybe this could be of some  
help to you?
http://map.squeak.org/package/61f807be-83a3-4944-bfa1-686ddac7153cGuess so. Thanks to Scott and Ted goes without saying... without  
those great guys no Etoys would have ever made it...:-)
>
Thanks Andreas!

Cheers,

Markus

Markus Gaelli wrote:
> Did anyone of you consider not to store the docs/specs of Etoys
> statically, but the commands to recreate the docs?
> I am imagining sth like "Create standard playfield at 100@100 called
> SolarSystem / Change color of SolarSystem to black/ Drop standard
> ellipse into SolarSystem called sun/... and so on.

Yes, Ted did some work on this in Tweak. The goal was to enable a user
to get an understanding about some other user's project (this was
actually triggered by some eToys project of yours where I couldn't for
the hell of it figure out how you'd done it and wondered if there isn't
a way for the system to explain that project to me). This is an
interesting line of work but not quite complete enough to be feasible
right now (also, it works only in Tweak since it relies on being able to
record the user vs. the system modifications - in Tweak, we keep track
of such end-user changes in an objects "tweaks" which is a list of user
modifications readily available for analysis).

> According to
> http://www.csounds.com/manual/html/OSCNetwork.html (what's in a name...;-)
> csound comes with osc, and I happen to have written an osc-client and
> server for squeak found on Squeakmap, maybe this could be of some help
> to you?

I don't know much about either CSound or OSC. It'd be great if there
were some eToys UI for it, that would allow one to play a series of
notes from some holder or so.

Cheers,
   - Andreas

On Sep 15, 2006, at 10:09 AM, Andreas Raab wrote:

;-)

> This is an interesting line of work but not quite complete enough  
> to be feasible right now (also, it works only in Tweak since it  
> relies on being able to record the user vs. the system  
> modifications - in Tweak, we keep track of such end-user changes in  
> an objects "tweaks" which is a list of user modifications readily  
> available for analysis).

What do you think about using these logs as an overall storage  
mechanism for projects/docs? Maybe not now, but in some time in the  
future?

Do you imagine an interface to TamTam? TamTam uses the greyscale  
mode, btw. will Etoys be available in greyscale mode also?
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/TamTam

I guess the easiest to interface to TamTam would be to emulate python  
commands sent to the CSoundServer as found in:
http://dev.laptop.org/git.do?p=projects/ 
tamtam;a=blob;h=f3adc4b19f2b7352535c1e805065eee1d830f265;hb=697021638dd0
c608e58f95b3a9e2fc4461aa53be;f=Framework/CSound/CSoundServer.py

We needed to emulate the notes according to:
http://dev.laptop.org/git.do?p=projects/ 
tamtam;a=blob;h=40a19e5054bce50b7c189cbc176073ae3a685a20;hb=697021638dd0
c608e58f95b3a9e2fc4461aa53be;f=Framework/CSound/CSoundNote.py

Don't know why they don't use OSC instead -- funny thing to send  
_any_ python command over a socket to some other machine (exec !)...
Looks like Etoys could then play tunes together with TamTam, even  
sitting on some different machines... :-)

BUT: If you "only" wanted to create MIDI files to be played by csound  
you might want to have a look at
http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/1406#Audio

which gives you a MidiScore to MIDI file writer by Yisrael Lowenstein  
(Squeak 2.8 though, and beta, and I haven't tried it).

Cheers,

Markus