Squeak Smalltalk is wholly unlike any other open source programming tool you’ve worked with – and mostly in good ways. Unfortunately, it’s the bad ways that make the first impression. This hands-on tutorial will help you get past the unfamiliar and the unwieldy so that you can take advantage of the elegant and productive environment that lies underneath. We’ll cover what makes Smalltalk so wonderful: the “turtles all the way down” approach to language design, the highly integrated code browsers, object inspectors, and debuggers, the accessibility (and hackability) of every piece of library code, the built-in refactoring and unit testing support, and the extreme dynamicity and portability of the environment. But we’ll also address the practical concerns that keep people away from Squeak: how to get rid of the pastel colors and bitmapped fonts so that you can stand to look at it; how to get your source code into version control so you can collaborate with others; how to find documentation and examples; how to integrate with the OS and with C libraries; how to manage deployment.
Randal L. Schwartz (Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc.)
Squeak Smalltalk is the latest language to be supported on the iPhone platform. We talked to John M McIntosh who ported Squeak to the iPhone and also released software built with Squeak (and its…
I had less time to read/listen/watch in the last two weeks. So I skipped the summary of the most interesting reading for the last week. Ok, let’s talk about SmallTalk then. I’m very disappointed I never found the time to learn about what can be considered the father of all the modern languages you hear about. Unfortunately I need to keep this desire low priority in my task list for some more. Even if I’m not actively following, I noticed that the SmallTalk community is alive and kicking, producing software, podcasts and tons of screencasts. Anyway, Industry Misinterpretations 129: Smalltalk in Small Places is about running Squeak on the iPhone. The process is a bit complicated: you need to strip useless classes from the VM and compile all down to C and use an Objective-C to SmallTalk bridge to connect the two world. The micro-VM was used to run Pier (CMS) which runs on top of SeaSide. So you’ve got pretty much all the SmallTalk possible goodness on the iPhone. The interview is a fascinating trip inside the internals of the VM, the garbage collector and the Obj-C to SmallTalk bridge. Have a peek at http://isqueak.org.
Lessons In iPhone Game Marketing… This is an interesting and sad listening. It talks about how important it is to get in those top 100 by iTunes store ranking for whatever good/bad application. The sad part is that 6 months of development for a game can bring to 500$ in revenue if you miss that top 100. It means it has nothing to do with quality, robustness, reliability of software, but with good marketing. The top 100 is reached after a certain number of downloads after the launch or because Apple decides to feature the app. The integration of the number of downloads over the time doesn’t matter even if you have a great average/day. The way you can get into the top 100 are pre-releases to send to online specialized websites for review, advertisement with promos, a light and free version that seduces the user to buy the 5$ version. In one word “buzz” that needs to converge at launch time to reach the tipping point. Just want to remember that in the AppStore quality is not as important as good marketing.
O’Reilly Open Source Conference - Robert “r0ml” Lefkowitz on Open Source… Here’s a funny and short presentation. Robert Lefkowitz is a skilled orator in the ancient roman sense. And is right from the Quintilian’s Institutes of Oratory one century B.C. that apparently our modern “phases” of software development come from. It’s hilarious how such an old essay is applicable to our modern times and the similarities between the Microsoft development process or RUP. From there Lefkowitz explains his idea for an Open Source development process: exceptional driven development. No requirements, no nothing, just straight deploy waiting for customers who create tickets to request what they need! Of course this is a parody but there is some truth, for example in the description of what a requirement is. A requirement is the expression of our fear, an illusion of power to domesticate the future of the soon to be developed software. Naked planning comes to mind: eliminate the waste required to produce almost useless estimates.
Chariot Tech Cast - Grails… I was curious to see how Grails was doing after a couple of years away from the Java world. Good to see that now Grails is a solid framework that can be used exactly like Rails. Type Grails app-name from the command line and you’ve got your nice project layout to start with, no hassles. I was thinking that if I need to work on a Java web application again I will definitely start from a Grails app, write tests and pure Java at first (a language I know) to gradually transform and move to pure Groovy. Sounds like a plan.
Why you have to engage in social media, even if you don’t want to… Summary: a web presence is not sufficient to guarantee popularity anymore. This was the case 10 years ago but today for each line of business there are tons of competing companies all with good services and products. Solution: social networks. Web presence today means 2 things: contents (the old blog) and social networking which works like a review system by word of mouth. I work for a software house and I think the same thing applies here. There are tons of good programming firm and the only way you have to enter the “cool kids” status is by word of mouth by social networking. First step: put decent contents (not just for marketing) on the web, produce open source software, speak at conferences and user groups. Second: build trust by publishing opinions and pointers to your content via social networks. If you don’t do this your customer base risks to become stale.
The Web 2.0 Show - Jason Fried… I enjoyed this interview with Jason Fried which is very actual despite the date of recording, January 2006. I never read “Getting Real” but I suppose what I heard here is more or less what’s on the book. Speaking of which, “Less is More” is one of the 37Signals slogans which refers to everything: less developers, less pages, less features, with the goal of creating something simple but complete in each part. I’m sure you can do everything interface first, but I prefer the approach of front-end back-end at the same time and in the same team. Interesting the approach of asking the customer feedback after the application is rolled-out. Basecamp was created in 10 hours/week for 3.5 months: it takes that long to create a great product if you stay really focused. The perpetual beta of some products is just bullshit because it looks more a way to apologize in advance for the crappiness of the product. Better focus on something 100% done from the start instead.
The Web 2.0 Show - Eric Meyer… Here’s an old (2006) interview with Eric Mayer. Eric talks about the future of paper-based publishing especially in the computer science field. Today is more profitable to self-publish your work considering how easy it is to create a following with just your web presence. If book publishing companies want to survive they have to adapt to some form of electronic process, offering authors editing or marketing services disconnected from the physical creation of a book. That’s exactly what happened thinking at the Pragmatic BookShelf or the O’Reilly online book format. There is also some room in the interview to talk about Eric’s experience. He became the CSS guru publishing tons of content about CSS for free and only after he was offered to write the popular book. He talks also about the UI design process, starting from photoshop comps, merging all layers, slicing and starting creating the box layout.
