Today's Smalltalk 4 You looks at the emergency evaluator in Pharo. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube. To watch now, click on the image below:
If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.
Today's Smalltalk 4 You is a video from STIC 2013 - david Buck demonstrating ElastoLab (his physics simulator) in a lightning talk. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube. To watch now, click on the image below:
If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.
Today's Smalltalk 4 You looks at another recent change in VisualWorks - the deprecation of ApplicationWindow. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube. To watch now, click on the image below:
If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.
I'm a bit skeptical - the game has a defined beginning, middle and end - so I'm skeptical about how well DLC will fit into the narrative. Still, I liked the game, and the DLC is supposed to slot in during a failry obvious interstitial in the game. I downloaded the DLC while I was visiting my sister; we'll see how it goes :)
Unlike other software products, web applications are visible world-wide by default. To be beneficial for users world-wide, especially for the increasing number of users from non-English speaking countries, companies involved in the internationalization of their business have to consider website localization. Website localization is indispensable to make the webside a global success. However, base Smalltalk systems, Seaside and previous versions of seaBreeze are minimally prepared for localization. The presentation explains fundamentals of Internationalization (I18N) and Localization (L10N) and deduces an Internationalization and Localization Model in Smalltalk, implemented in SeaBreeze. Concepts of localization processes and tools are demonstrated, including Machine Translation (MT) and Translation Memories (TM). A demo of seaBreeze 5.0 concludes the presentation.
Francis Stephany has a nice writeup comparing and contrasting what he does with Ruby on Rails to what he does with Seaside. Good info, and it points out a few shortcomings while being generally positive.
I've said for a long time that vendors and marketing departments have been living in denial, and just assuming that advertising works. Well - there's new information out there (from Business Insider) that demonstrates what a bad idea that denial is:
"you are 31.25 times more likely to win a prize in the Mega Millions than you are to click on a banner ad." Not only that, "you are 87.8 times more likely to apply to Harvard and get in...112.50 times more likely to sign up for and complete NAVY SEAL training...279.64 times more likely to climb Mount Everest...and 475.28 times more likely to survive a plane crash than you are to click on a banner ad."
This also explains the truly annoying pop-over, roll down (et. al.) ads, which try to trick you into accidentally clicking on them - as if that would actually generate a sale. Vendors have to actually do the hard work of:
Creating compelling products
Telling people why those products are useful (in a way that actually engages them - more use case, less flash)
Stop being lazy with traditional advertising methods
The data is pretty clear; you'll be able to tell the smart vendors from the dumb ones based on how (or if) they react to that data...
Runar Jordahl links to a post about Tablets and the Cloud, and passes on his own thoughts:
Skrishnamachari says that better interfacing with Java is vital to grow Smalltalk’s use in cloud computing. That might be true, but interfacing to NoSQL databases (Cassandra, Riak, Hbase) and services (like AWS) running in the cloud, is just as important. Cloudfork is one such interface, the Riak interface another. I think we should be able to write great cloud applications from scratch using Smalltalk, and increasingly these tools are becoming more important.
One thing that you'll notice right off is the complete dearth of commercial Smalltalk support for tablet devices. All of the action is in Pharo and Squeak, where there's been a fair bit of work done to support IOS, and a start at Android support. Cloud/web interfacing looks more possible for the commercial systems, but again - most of the action is coming from community people (Cloudfork, anyone?).
I understand the need to support the existing customer base, and the whole "where's the revenue?" problem - but at the same time, these are areas that really can't be ignored.