VERY interesting videos

Following a link from the Squeak-dev mailing list... I watched theses two videos (a presentation in two parts) by Alan Kay, circa 87 ... They are brilliant, and extremely interesting. Definitely something to view !

Part 1

Part 2

(ps: Squeak is an incredible environment, and Seaside is a fantastic web app framework running in Squeak... worth your time..)

addendum: Interesting PDF about PARC's work ...

addendum 2: another interesting video, an interview of alan kay.

Screenshot UKUUG Demo

Just to show you how the demo was looking:



Nice no ? :)

UKUUG Talk

I just gave the UKUUG gnustep presentation an hour ago, and I think it went fine...
Not completely as planned -- I wanted to use keynote on an ibook for the slides part, and use my powerbook under linux to make the demonstration via a vnc connection, and of course... when I tried the setup yesterday it worked without a hitch. But when I tried today just before the presentation the client didn't want to connect for whatever reason .. as I didn't have the time to find what was the problem, I ended doing the keynote presentation with the powerbook (at least it was faster and smoother than if I had used the ibook g3..), and just rebooted under linux for the demo. Not as smooth, but that was ok.

The GNUstep presentation .. -- well, manipulating apps wasn't that easy as the screen wasn't cloned, so I needed to look to the projection screen instead... ;-) but I was able to present mostly all I wanted:

• GWorkspace, with Camaelon + the new icons from jasper...


• panel hiding, applications hiding, tear-off menus (but all rather quickly though... not sure I explained well that part)


• the services system, taking the LaTeX service, the Zipper service and the GNUMail service as example (LaTeX in Ink.app, then use Zipper to create some tgz from GWorkspace, and finally select the tgz and mail it via GNUMail...


• GORM -- I started with the basic demo of slider + textview linked together, then I did a demo using a custom palette I wrote yesterday (just for the talk!), which had one object managing a volumetric dataset (a head), and two views rendering the dataset. So it let you create a complete app visualizing a dataset in different way... all in Gorm, without needed to code anything. Pretty nice I thought ;-)
  

I could have talked much longer than the authorized time, I forgot to say and show some things, but all in all it went well. At the end of the talk the chairman asked how many people had used GNUstep before the talk (3 persons), and how many will try after the talk (5-6 persons?). With around 20+ persons (?) in the room that wasn't bad ;-)

Apparently people were impressed by Gorm :-) , and liked the look of the apps ("it's clean") -- good icons and Camaelon did their job I guess ;-)

I'll put some screenshots later so you could see how did that look..

update...

Well, quite a lot of things to do this week... in the end I didn't have time to work on camaelon last weekend (well, I worked on the glyph bug) but camaelon 2 release is still planned soon, along with other étoilé's components (hopefully this weekend ? finally ?) .. I need to fix the display glyph bugs in -gui first..

Else, I'm preparing the GNUstep talk I'm giving at the UKUUG 2005 Linux Technical Conference this saturday at the university of swansea, I'll try to make a cool demo of gorm, showing the power of building apps with components .. ;-)

On other topics.. my bag was stolen this afternoon *on my desk*, in the lab, when I went to lunch for half an hour... quite a few things inside, like, my passport, my keys, my newton... that really, really sucks. damn. This in a building supposedly with secured access..