Re: Tweak questions (was: Antialiased Morphs?)

On Jan 31, 2007, at 17:06 , Sebastian Nozzi wrote:

> > This isn't exactly newbie stuff, so I'd rather take this to squeak-
> > dev.
>
> I will then take this questions to squeak-dev and resort to more  
> "newbie" ones...
>
> In many places I have read things like Morphic will be replaced by  
> Tweak, and that Tweak is much better and cleaner. This brings me  
> some questions, like:
>
> 1) Is this official? Is this in the roadmap of the main Squeak  
> project? (at least it appears to be in the roadmap of Croquet, and  
> this is a very good sign).

It's not official. There are multiple UI projects being worked on in  
the community, which I think have better chances of getting adopted,  
because they're more traditional. Tweak goes beyond plain Smalltalk  
in various ways.

> 2) Should I, as a newbie, forget about learning Morphic and jump  
> straight to Tweak instead?

There are many more people who could help you with Morphic, and the  
basic principles still hold in Tweak. So I'd go with Morphic for now.

> 3) Will Tweak also offer this "embedding" of graphical objects in  
> one another to build up an interface (or "view"). Will it offer  
> this ability to manipulate the graphic elements as Morphs offer?

Yes, it also has halos etc.

> 4) The Tweak site seems to be out of maintenance and the mailing  
> list has very low traffic... are people still working on the  
> project? (honestly asking) What is the state of Tweak? Is it  
> feature complete? Is it half feature complete? (sorry if this info  
> is somewhere else)

Well, the base system works, there is only the occasional fix - see,  
for example

        http://source.impara.de/Tweak.html

(sort the versions by date to see recent commits). Nobody has time to  
update the website, I think impara moved servers so the download is  
broken, etc. Tweak is the 2D UI for Croquet and used in Sophie, for  
example. But there are few non-professional users yet, everyone is  
busy ...

> > There is no Rome list, as far as I know you are the first one
> > trying to use it for Morphic rendering.
>
> It's not that I want it specifically for Morphic rendering... I  
> want Squeak and I want antialiased looks. If you tell me that Tweak  
> is the future, and that in Tweak it would be easier to have  
> antialiased graphics (with the plug-and-play ability of Morphs) I  
> just jump for it... :-)

Well, it's still a tough walk. The Rome integration is a proof-of- 
concept, not more, really.

> I always wondered why not many people (appearently not at all) are  
> interested in antialiased graphics in Squeak. Even more being that  
> it is so widely used in the Mac world, which all the graphic engine  
> quartz antialiased stuff (I being also a Mac owner). For me, a live  
> development environment with good 21st century graphics would be a  
> clear winner...

Indeed. It's not even hard, but still a lot of work. Go for it :)

- Bert -