Skip to main content

Sparkle: Let's Annoy Users Differently - Wednesday, January 26th

For our January meeting, we'll be hosting GemTalk's Martin McClure who will talk about a new Smalltalk IDE - Sparkle.

If you're setting out to develop a Smalltalk IDE from scratch, what design decisions do you make? You'd love to "fix" the things that have long annoyed you in existing IDEs, but new designs risk creating their own novel annoyances.
The Sparkle project-in-progress is creating a new and not entirely conventional development environment for GemStone Smalltalk. Come see factors that have influenced its design, get a demo of the current state of the tools, learn about the project's next steps, and share *your* IDE annoyances.

Martin heard about Smalltalk in 1975, *finally* got his hands on a running Smalltalk system ten years later, and hasn't let go since. In his 25 years on the GemStone team, Martin has worked on many aspects - some VM internals, some user interface design, but mostly all the things that go in between. In his rare spare time, he works on Mist, a Smalltalk variant with improved modularity and no virtual machine. When not dodging Covid, he does a lot of contra and country dancing.

This will be an online meeting from home.

If you'd like to join us, please sign up in advance on the meeting's Meetup page to receive the meeting details. Don’t forget to bring your laptop and drinks!

 Update 13 February 2022: the recording of the presentation is now available on Vimeo.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Tour of Architectural Abstraction with Objective-S - Wednesday, November 24th

This month, the UKSTUG will take a look at Objective-S , an architecture-oriented programming language based on Smalltalk and Objective-C, by hosting his creator Marcel Weiher. As per Alan Kay, “Code seems large and complicated for what it does” . Objective-S addresses one source of this accidental complexity: using software architectural abstraction to directly expresses the much wider variety of architectural styles typical of modern software systems, compared to traditional programming languages that still follow the call/return architectural style of scientific programs from the early days of computing. Marcel Weiher started his forays into dynamic object-oriented computing by implementing Objective-C on his Amiga 35 years ago and hasn’t stopped since. Stops on the way have been at Apple, the BBC, Microsoft and various startups, as well as contributing to Squeak. He is currently a principal software engineer at Citymapper and PhD student at HPI, where he is trying to distill some

Deploying to the cloud from Pharo - Wednesday, July 29th

The next meeting of the UK Smalltalk User Group will be on Wednesday, July 29th. Peter Svensson will present his work on Cloudsdk-st. Cloudsdk-st is an experiment in ways to work with cloud deployment from a Smalltalk image. Traditionally cloud deployments run 'out of band' in separate build scripts or build/CI/CD systems. This project lets you define Docker images (using Dockerfiles) for Smalltalk, send them to the build system of a cloud provider directly and then choose what kind of service you want your image to be (cloud function or long-running VM). Currently it only supports Google Cloud and has a very rough UI. Future plans include support for AWS and Azure as well as better feedback and a Spec2 UI. Given the current COVID-19 restrictions, this will be an online meeting from home. If you'd like to join us, please sign up in advance on the meeting's Meetup page to receive the meeting details. Don’t forget to bring your laptop and drinks!

Kyma - an object oriented sound and music system - Wednesday, May 27th

The next meeting of the UK Smalltalk User Group will be on Wednesday, May 27th. Alan Jackson will talk to us about Kyma , an object- oriented sound design environment built with Smalltalk technology. Given the current COVID-19 restrictions, this will be an online meeting from home. If you'd like to join us, please sign up in advance on the meeting's  Meetup page  to receive the meeting details. Don’t forget to bring your laptop and drinks!