Smalltalk Solutions 2008

This is a great show for Smalltalkers, and those wanting to learn about the technology and whats new.

I always enjoyed attending.
 

There are some very interesting talks this year, including Gilad Bracha, whom I mentioned in my previous post, giving one of the keynotes. See the links for the listed talks below.

You can go here to register.  Highly recommended.
 
The show is held in Reno this year, in order to have a very nice facility at a very reasonable hotel rate.  Check it out.

See you there!    - Arden

Calendar schedule

Talks List

 

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Smalltalk Solutions 2008

This is a great show for Smalltalkers, and those wanting to learn about the technology and whats new. I always enjoyed attending.

There are some very interesting talks this year, including Gilad Bracha, whom I mentioned in my previous post, giving one of the keynotes.  See the links for the listed talks below.

You can go here to register.  Highly recommended.

The show is held in Reno this year, in order to have a very nice facility at a very reasonable hotel rate.

See you there!

Calendar schedule

Talks List

Smalltalk Night at OOP - Materials 

We have had a lot of requests for the slides from the OOP Smalltalk night presentation, so we are making (thank to James efforts) them available, along with audio, and audio-visual.  See James blog for lots of pictures and other coverage of the OOP show too.

"If you like Ruby on Rails, You'll Love Seaside on Smalltalk" by Arden Thomas 

I would recommend you download the slides, then listen to the audio while going through the slides.  The slides are not meant to be self explanatory.

Here are the links to the presentation :
 

Slides

Audio

Video

 

"Web Development as you Like it" by Lukas Renggli
 

Lukas gives an excellent demonstration and description of Seaside. 

The audio is in German however.

Lukas audio (in German)

Lukas Video

Lukas Slides

I gave a presentation at the Smalltalk evening at OOP 2008.

James preserved the presentation both in video and podcast form (great job,Thanks Jim!).

The presentation was aimed at educating non-Smalltalkers of the power and advantages of the Seaside framework, and the Smalltalk language. 

The presentation basically covered two things:

- What is Seaside, How is it different, and Why should I be interested?

- What is Smaltalk, How is it different, and Why should I be interested? 

I found this a useful and interesting exercise.  Instead of focusing on specific details, I wanted to back up, and think about what the attractive and salient points of these products are.

Seaside was easier in a way, since it is a newer technology.   But I really hope the perspective on Smalltalk had an impact, both to those learning about it for the first time, but especially to Smalltalkers who occasionally have to justify their use of the technology to their management.

The talk lays out three capabilities of Smalltalk that were overlooked by the languages that borrowed from it, and are meaningful today, perhaps more than ever - the features I posit are helping drive the resurgence & renaissance of Smalltalk.

I welcome any comments or feedback, having refinement or perspective on this message.

Thanks!

OOP 2008!

The Cincom Smalltalk Star team just got back from the OOP 2008 conference held near Munich Germany. It was interesting and enjoyable and Smalltalk got some great exposure and interest.

The Dynamic Language Shootout, sponsored by Java Spektrum

This was a competition where developers could use a dynamic language to solve a programming problem. I've listed the languages that were used below.

Python

2 Smalltalk (VisualWorks, Squeak)

2 Groovy

Perl

2 Ruby

Lua

Scheme

Haskell

Scala

See Dynamic Languages Shootout if you read German, go here for a google English translation.

The application was the game of scrabble.

Bottom line? The winning entry was done in Seaside on VisualWorks!

Of course we were very happy to see this outcome. The winner, Thorsten Seitz, really earned the win, doing well thought out work on every aspect of the application. The part that grabbed my attention immediately was the interface. It was gorgeous! See below for a screenshot.

An interesting post from Jame's blog about music; buy only the bits, or is physical media needed? 

From a less is more philosophy, the bits only, would be the way to go. 

For folks wanting to simplify things, or even just reduce clutter, the bits only option seems the better alternative.  Note that if you have the desire to then burn all this to physical media, and if you marked it poorly or not at all, this would defeat the purpose.

Folks that like to create collections that they can enjoy, or even sell/trade in the future would still want the physical media.  I wonder how much of this is just nostalgia?

What did the holidays bring?

I guess the holidays are basically over now. I managed to fit in the movies I usually watch with the family at this time of year. ("Christmas Carol" (the one with Patrick Stewart), and "It's a Wonderful Life" - both classics. Recommended if you have not seen them) .

I got one gift that is very neat, and is proving to be very fun and useful. An iPod Touch. I have resisted Apple products in the past for two reasons:

First, I grew up in "IBM country" where IBM used to employ so many folks, that growing up here, four out of five of your neighbors worked for IBM. Local towns of Poughkeepsie and East Fishkill employed, at their peak, somewhere between ten and twelve thousand employees each. So most folks here had PC's, and not Macs, due to local influence, employee pricing, or loyalty to the local employer. (I worked for IBM for nine years, taught myself Smalltalk while there, and got a Smalltalk based project going at IBM. I left to join ParcPlace and continue with Smalltalk when funding was cut, and the ability to continue using Smalltalk with my employer went away).

Second, iPods would not play (or not easily) protected WMA based books that I frequently listened to during my commutes and travels. This is not so much an issue for me now.

So why the change? Based on the title of my blog and love of Smalltalk, you might guess that I can appreciate a simple, beautiful, and well designed interface. I also feel, in general, that we should try to support the products and companies that take the time to produce better designs, and interfaces, (lest we get stuck with no good choices), when it is possible or reasonable to do so.

What do I like about the iTouch?

• Flipping through pictures with a flick of the finger is intuitive and entertaining. Great interface.
• Video: My kids are competitive swimmers, and occasionally I take some footage of their races. It was simple to put these on the iTouch. This makes it easier for me to show my co-workers pictures AND video of my children (as they patiently indulge me, hmmm, I better stay with the shorter races :-) ).
• The Web! Safari and Wifi are built in. I can wake up in the morning and check web pages for weather, school cancellations, check my blog for feedback, read James blog, etc, all without firing up any computer!
• Multi-touch: Zooming in and out with a simple, intuitive two finger gesture is great. It is needed for reading web pages, but very easy to zoom in and slide through the pages.
• Auto aspect rotation: Simply rotating the iTouch from portrait to landscape orientation, automatically rotates the contents (pictures and web) for readability. Simple, useful and entertaining.
• Podcasts! I can get them in three ways: I can download them automatically through iTunes, I can manually download them to the iTouch, or I can download and listen to them from the safari browser on the iTouch. Very flexible!
• I almost forgot:  It plays mp3's too!  :-)
  

I picked this excerpt from a blog about a presentation by Evan Williams, founder of Twitter:

See the full bog post here.

 "What is Simplicity?

At the cmf2007 conference in November Stanford's Dr. B.J. Fogg gave a talk on persuasive technology. Simplicity was dwelt upon in some detail and even defined. Fogg's definition of simplicity was "the minimally satisfying solution at the lowest cost." He asserted that there were six elements to simplicity:

1. Time
2. Money
3. Physical Effort
4. Brain Cycles
5. Social Deviance
6. Non-routine

...and that simplicity is a function of your scarcest resource at the moment. On the Web, I'd venture that routine, brain cycles and time are our most common scarce resources.

For Evan, for FeedBurner, for Fotolog, for Google and for others, great amounts of value have been created by delivering web-based simplicity, not by adding and expanding. This was Evan's message. "What can you create by taking things away?", was what he asked."

New to Smalltalk? 

Have you downloaded our NC (non-commercial) version and want to know where/how to start?

The easiest place to get going is by going to our smalltalk Videos, followed by our screencasts.

There is also excellent Smalltalk reference and tutorial verbiage here.

Of course, make sure to check our main site  cincomsmalltalk, and a great set of blogs.

 - Arden

OOPSLA 2007 is wrapping up.  I did not attend this year, and that was an error on my part.  There have reportedly been some great papers and keynotes delivered, notably Guy Steele & Richard Gabriel's "50 in 50" presentation (50 languages in 50 years).  I'm told by colleagues that this is an instant classic.  You don't get the full effect from just the audio, but even so it is still interesting.  Get the mp3 here.

See all the OOPSLA podcasts

Forbes has an interesting article this week about consumer electronics designed to do one thing, and do that one thing well.  One Trick Pony

The article uses the iPod shuffle, and a simple cell phone as examples of what many consumers want.

Less is more can be very attractive in consumer electronics, depending on the needs.