Tuesday, 29 January 2002
I was just looking at the screenshot again before I went home and realized I was writing Objective-C in Smalltalk. [ ] is not for messaging, it creates a block. Wow, I am out of practice.
12:31 AMYup, they were row and column.
- (void)_singleClick:(unsigned int)row :(unsigned short)column;
I wonder why the authors of Terminal decided to use an empty parameter name like that. I guess it's in Objective-C to maintain compatibility with languages that don't have multipart method names, but they didn't want to use the varargs syntax. AFAIK, Smalltalk doesn't support anything similar… no, it doesn't.
The above picture was inserted with the new “My Pictures” tool. Really good. Does exactly what I expected.
BTW, the browser above is Whisker. I saw Doug Way, its author, at MacHack last year, he was wearing a Squeak t-shirt, great because I couldn't navigate the Squeak website to find out where the downloads were (it's much better now). Aside from showing me where to get Squeak for the Mac, he demoed his browser to me. I was really impressed, as I continue to be when I use it. It does automatic window layout, and uses color coding to great advantage (different classes show up in different hues; different methods within the same class in different shades).
Development tool development really seems moribund. We need more interactive, self-introspective systems like Smalltalk, so people can experiment and build their own tools without needing to make a huge investment. The amount of likely proprietary infrastructure required for a Whisker equivalent in C++ or Java is substantial, and the only people who can do it, they're too busy building another EJB-CORBA-.NET tool of the day for big-ticket corporate development.
But there is hope, at least, in the form of Eclipse. OTI made Envy, an incredible (if somewhat hard-to-use) team development product for Smalltalk and Java. I hope it takes off.
Monday, 28 January 2002
Got posing working on Terminal.app's TermView class. The method I'm using (by the number of warnings I get at compile time) is not very clean, but it does work. Next thing is to figure out how mouse clicks are routed.
- (void)_singleClick:(unsigned int)fp12:(unsigned char)fp16;
That looks good, but I don't know what the parameters are. Row and column maybe?
Just going back through the papers I'm referencing in my new proposal, and I found out I overlooked the profiling behavior of P3T+. Which means my idea isn't really all that different after all. Sigh.
Ken Deffeyes
(made semi-famous in general circles by John McPhee's book Basin
and Range) wrote a book about our reliance on oil. Should get it,
I wonder if he writes the way he talks. Reminds me I still need to
finish Assembling California; I'm got about 50% through it and
then was distracted by Cocoa books.
But all the computers in the world won't make a scrap of difference if
we don't deal with our dependence on oil, will it?
