Re: Invitation to visit Disney Imagineering

["Ian Bicking" <bickiia@earlham.edu>]

> Doug, I've been thinking about this and here are my thoughts. My take is that the
> Squeak development team's interest is to have someone from seul-edu visit them
> who is interested in working with them to further their goals concerning Squeak,
> not a sightseer. 

Quite true.  Is there anyone else who has used Squeak or 
Smalltalk at all?  Is there anyone who's interested in starting?

I could say all sorts of nice things about Squeak but that probably 
doesn't mean much.  It is worth learning, even if you don't end up 
using it a lot -- practically a family of languages on its own, and 
managing to be at the forefront of OO even 20 (or 25?) years after 
its creation.  And if you want to ask some questions as you learn, 
I'll try my best to answer.  So if anyone is interested, do consider it.


On the HyperStudio front, I've been learning more about it, and the 
more I learn the more doable a replacement seems.  It's a unified, 
simple, general multimedia presentation/interaction environment.  
Nothing fancy, no revolutionary ideas, which is probably part of its 
appeal.  It doesn't offer very good platform independance.  On 
Windows it looks really funny -- part Mac interface, part Windows.  
It has a clean feel on the Mac, but certainly not on Windows.  It's a 
decent program, reasonably priced, lots of workshops and training 
and lots of evangelism.  I suppose if we want to evangelize Linux in 
schools it could provide a model.

And, though I don't like to seem like I would celebrate 
HyperStudio's demise -- it's fairly good compared to much 
educational software -- it looks like there's clouds on its horizon.  It 
was recently bought up by Knowledge Adventure (makers of 
KidPix, among other programs) which fired almost everyone 
involved in the original company a week or two ago -- president, 
programmers, and all.  I don't know what they are planning, but it 
seems sinister at best... anyway, this sort of thing is a flaw in 
corporate control, and perhaps mixing the noncompetetive 
atmosphere of education with the almost destructive nature of the 
free market.  (at least in the US it's *our* free market -- in other 
countries I imagine there must be even more of a feeling of 
helplessness)

The HyperStudio Journal closed its doors in anger over the issue, 
and the community around it could be in for some troubled times.



--
Ian Bicking <bickiia@earlham.edu>