SqueakMap is a distributed catalog system for Squeak. It primarily keeps track of packages and their releases, but it is actually meant to keep track of many more things - to become our "shared community memory".
In text, SqueakMap is often abbreviated as "SM". SM lets you do these things (and much more):
Install other people's published Squeak packages into your image using a single mouse click.
Upgrade your installed packages using a single mouse click.
Publish your own packages in SqueakMap making them immediately available for all to use.
So in short - it is really useful! :-)
After its introduction SqueakMap has become the standard way to register and make packages/applications available for Squeak users.
Using SqueakMap
The easiest way to use SqueakMap is to select "open..." in the World menu (clicking on the Squeak desktop) and then "SqueakMap Package Loader" (or previously named just "Package Loader").
The tool that opens let you browse the catalog, filter it, and select packages or specific releases of packages and install them over the Internet into your local Squeak image. Make sure you look at the context menus available in the listboxes.
Per default the loader shows ALL packages in the map, you can see how many is shown and the total current number of packages in the window title.
If you want to be on the safe side and only see the packages that have published releases for your Squeak version, then you should check the filter called "display only new safely available packages". Now, to install something - just select the package and choose "install" in the context menu.
If you want to learn how to make packages and put them on SqueakMap, see FAQ: Squeak Packages.
2004-01-18: A major upgrade of SqueakMap has been performed, see article SM2. This includes important new features such as multiple version support for packages (so called releases), package caching, and user accounts allowing multiple maintainers of packages. The support for package releases will also allow a package dependency scheme to be developed.
Other pages
...about SqueakMap on this Swiki. Feel free to hook in any page you find that somehow has to do with SqueakMap. This is so that we more easily can keep these up to date.
Nov 2005: Göran Krampe announced that the links above will change soon.
Other links
http://anakin.bluefish.se/gohu/11, the current homepage for "SqueakMap". This is Göran's own readonly swiki where he sometimes puts information that he doesn't want to clutter this Swiki with.
http://modules.squeakfoundation.org/People/gk, Göran's Monticello repository where the latest code is always accessible. There are NO guarantees about the snapshots available there - it should only be used if you want to help developing SqueakMap, always use the releases of SqueakMap2 base and the loader that are available through SqueakMap itself!
Add any questions here and also post on squeak-dev to get answers.
Q: SqueakMap raises an error when I try to start it up with the "open.../Package Loader" menu, even though I'm using a freshly downloaded .changes file.
A: In the "sm" directory there are files called map.xxx.sgz. These are the snapshots of the map. The simplest solution is to just delete the entire "sm" directory. Then SqueakMap will load a fresh map from the net when you tell it to "update map from the net" or execute "SMSqueakMap default loadUpdates", and this should hopefully always work.