SqueakVM for Android and tablet choice?

 
Hi,

I am interested to use the Android port of Squeak VM [1] on a tablet
device. I have been able to install it on a recent Android emulator
(with Android 2.3); it starts, shows menus, etc. I used the apk file
found in the googlecode repo of [1], installed via adb.

One problem is, the emulator is very slow, so I am thinking about
getting an actual tablet device to experiment with. The variety of
tablets available is wide, so I am trying to narrow the choice,
preferrably to its low price end ;)

Disclaimer: I am not experienced with Android at all, just getting
started, but have a practical need for a tablet application, and see
Smalltalk as a good choice of implementation language.

Here are few questions:

1. Is Squeak UI responsive enough on a 600Mhz CPU tablet, or say 1 Ghz
is necessary?
2. Are there known tablets where Squeak VM just did not install/work
by any reason? Installation via adb is sufficient for my needs.
3. My application requires some speech synthesis. In the PC
application prototype I wrote a wrapper which invokes flite [2] and
passes the phrase to speak to it via command line (voice is not
perfect, but IMHO better than Klatt). Can Squeak access Android TTS
service (I am guessing its name is eyes-free [3]) in any way? At last,
there is a flite port for Android [4]. In general, is there any way to
call Java code from Squeak currently implemented?
4. The current version of Android Squeak does not support text input:
is this due to limitations in previous versions of NDK? NDK r5 claims
that input subsystem is available, does this lift the limitation?

Thanks for any ideas. I probably could already run my application on a
Windows/Linux tablet, but these tablets are more expensive and choice
is much narrower.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/squeak-android-vm/
[2] http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/flite/
[3] http://code.google.com/p/eyes-free/
[4] https://github.com/happyalu/Flite-TTS-Engine-for-Android/
--
Dimitry Golubovsky

Anywhere on the Web

 
On 1/26/2011 6:51 PM, Dimitry Golubovsky wrote:
> 1. Is Squeak UI responsive enough on a 600Mhz CPU tablet, or say 1 Ghz
> is necessary?

Get the fast one.

> 2. Are there known tablets where Squeak VM just did not install/work
> by any reason? Installation via adb is sufficient for my needs.

Don't know.

> 3. My application requires some speech synthesis. In the PC
> application prototype I wrote a wrapper which invokes flite [2] and
> passes the phrase to speak to it via command line (voice is not
> perfect, but IMHO better than Klatt). Can Squeak access Android TTS
> service (I am guessing its name is eyes-free [3]) in any way? At last,
> there is a flite port for Android [4]. In general, is there any way to
> call Java code from Squeak currently implemented?

In a general way, no. You can use JNI from C so if you wrote a plugin
that makes JNI calls back into Java it should work, but I don't think
anyone has done this yet.

> 4. The current version of Android Squeak does not support text input:
> is this due to limitations in previous versions of NDK? NDK r5 claims
> that input subsystem is available, does this lift the limitation?

We couldn't get it to work for the initial version. Help is greatly welcome.

Cheers,
   - Andreas

> Thanks for any ideas. I probably could already run my application on a
> Windows/Linux tablet, but these tablets are more expensive and choice
> is much narrower.
>
> [1] http://code.google.com/p/squeak-android-vm/
> [2] http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/flite/
> [3] http://code.google.com/p/eyes-free/
> [4] https://github.com/happyalu/Flite-TTS-Engine-for-Android/

On Jan 27, 2011, at 3:33 59PM, Andreas Raab wrote:

There is one: http://www.squeaksource.com/JNIPort .
It uses Alien FFI though, which I doubt is currently included in the Android vm.

Cheers,
Henry