Weekly update

I have of course done many weekly updates in private, but this is my first post (!) to this blog, so I will give some background as well.

My name is Benjamin Schroeder; I am working on recording Squeak programming sessions for later playback, using Croquet as a foundation. The plan is to start with 2D, rather than trying to figure out appropriate browser/workspace/inspector UIs for use in a 3D Croquet world.

So far, I have had some success recording and playing back simple Croquet interaction sequences, using the standard 3D Croquet simple demo island. There is another recording project at Minnesota; it takes a slightly different approach, but I may switch to using their code at some point if it is publicly available.

The standard Croquet interaction paradigm is 3D. There are 2D "embedded apps", but it is not clear whether these are properly replicated (and hence recordable) or not. Recently, I have been working on replicating simple 2D worlds using Croquet. To that end, I have been stripping down the Croquet "harness" object to reduce its reliance on OpenGL. The act of stripping parts out, while keeping very basic functionality working, has helped me understand more about what happens during a Croquet session.

I now understand how to replicate a single Morph, headless, across a network. I think my next step is to display the Morph inside an owner that converts mouse events to "future" sends, and then to try more complicated morphs. I am told that Tweak works better than Morphic with the synchronization mechanisms used during Croquet replication, and so I will likely switch to Tweak at some point. I have been learning a little about Tweak, but still have much to understand.