Caffeine Smalltalk – Livecode the Web | Hacker News Reader

Caffeine Smalltalk – Livecode the Web

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118 pointsalekq10 comments

Very cool. I just played with it on my iPad, and except for not having a way to do a right click (left click and drag to scroll panes seem to work) it was usable.

I don;t have time to do it myself, but an option to use a touch gesture in the bottom left corner to make other mouse clicks be right mouse clicks would make it fairly nice on a tablet.

A bit off topic, but seeing "Livecode" combined into a single word, instead of the normal two, made me think this was about the HyperCard-inspired programming language[1], instead of the just-in-time coding technique. :)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode

I know, plus its also being used as a term for coding tutorials in twitch. Kind of annoying.

and for music programming frameworks.

Does it really have to use a blurry canvas? I'd be much more interested in a normal HTML version.

Try Amber (amber-lang.net) - it's a Smalltalk implementation in JS and it doesn't use Morphic for display. It is, however, much less developed than either Squeak or Pharo; it may be alright for newcomers, but if you know one of the "real" Smalltalks, Amber falls rather short :(

The problem is that you either implement Morphic, which is designed to work on the level of pixels so you have to do it with <canvas>, or you don't and can then choose any display strategy you'd like. The problem is that Squeak and Pharo rely on Morphic for display, so you need to have it implemented if you want to reuse the code of those.

It's probably possible to write Morphic-compatible rendering framework based on React, for example, which would be an interesting excercise, but I don't know if anyone attempted it.

With Caffeine you can use whatever JS or Smalltalk UI framework you like, including React and morphic.js, a standalone JS implementation of Morphic from UC Berkeley's "Snap!" project that is much faster than Squeak Morphic at the moment.

Another good hack is to use Squeak Morphic, but draw each morph on its own canvas. That relieves a lot of the computational burden on SqueakJS.

There are examples of all of these things in the Squeak workspaces on the Caffeine page.

Thanks for checking it out!

Craig

Blurry? Not sure what you mean. Anyway, SqueakJS can do whatever JS stuff you like. For example, it's using jQuery UI to make the windows draggable. I'm working on voxel.js and React demos at the moment.

Thanks for checking it out!

Craig

Before anything else, this is a great project; always excited with Smalltalk -> JS projects. I noticed some blurriness as well, I wonder if it's an issue with Retina displays? I uploaded a screenshot here if it's helpful: http://imgur.com/a/NxhQp

Yes, on retina plain SqueakJS uses half the resolution, and by default the canvas interpolates. It looks sharper if you force pixel doubling: https://squeak.js.org/run/#url=https://freudenbergs.de/bert/... (by appending the pixelated flag to the url) but this looks worse when scaled, e.g. on iPad, so it's not the default. Caffeine, however, does support an HTML canvas - just try the included example which opens a workspace in HTML.

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