This page is for newbies to have a place to share with others the links, tips, tricks, epiphanies and other fundamental truths that help get them over the initial hurdles. So use it! When you finally figure out something that has been stumping you, put the answer here so others can benefit.
1. Click on the window background (desktop?) and choose new project (morphic), and click in the window to enter the morphic world. Click again on the background and choose open... and you can get your browser and email reader. Also, show flaps by choosing window from the morphic world menu. Flaps have lots of neat stuff in them.
3. Filing in from a web browser (pasted from the mailing list)
A. From the World menu choose "open..." then "web browser"
B. Tell Scamper the url and the code appears.
C. From the main panel menu in Scamper choose "view source" and the text appears in a new workspace.
D. Select all of the text in the workspace (cmd-a or a single click before the first character).
E. From the workspace menu choose "more..." then "file it in" (or if you like shortcuts: hold the shift key while you bring up the menu and go straight to "file it in")
4. I know it sounds obvious, but I almost missed "help" on the main menu. The menu doesn't have much for you when you are really desperate for HELP but it does have lots of interesting stuff!
5. The squeak wiki seems to be the best collection of information and links I could find. You may have come here from there. Check out the Squeak Swiki. There's also a FAQ at Squeak FAQ.
Nathan Young mailto:nathan@ncyoung.com
Here I put some links to tutorials and Squeak details that could interest newbies. Feel free to add some more.
Ever imported or created an object (Morphic or not Morphic) and then lost control of it? Wondered where it went, and how to remove it in a clean way?
There are some good tools for this, but it took me a long way to find. First try to evaluate "World explore". It will show you a complete overview of your current working world, including all of its sub objects (and submorphs)! I got this hint from the mailing list.
Another good hint they gave me: if you want to see the current instances of "aClass" (fill in any class you want), you can evaluate "aClass allInstances explore" (again, fill in your class instead of "aClass"). It will nicely show you all of the class's instances.
These hints gave me the feeling that I had real system control - Stefan Rieken
Just a note about explore. You can use explore to get a nice window representation of any Collection. For example: #(1 2 3) explore.
will bring up a window that shows each element of this collection. – Philip Knodle
On Sat, 6 Jan 2001, Hans N. Beck wrote to the mailing list and Bert Freudenberg answered:
> I'm new to Squeak, I have done my first steps with Squeak/WinNT. After the first look, there comes following questions related to GUI: Can Squeak used for GUI development?
Of course! I'd even say Squeak is the ultimate tool to develop new GUIs.
> I know that prof. Smalltalks have full Win32 GUI binding, COM bindung etc. On the other side: Morpic seems interesting, but it's only a thing of squeak, isn't it, not portable?
Actually it is portable exactly because it does not use the platform GUI stuff.
> - The relationship of standard MVC Interface to Morphic: If I can use MVC for GUI development/prototyping, why needing Morphic (let the knifes in, I'm a newbee ....) The other case: the old-fashioned ST-80 system with MVC is'nt powerful for GUI development, so a Smalltalker is fixed to his system with his GUI framework specific for his Dolphin, Smalltalk/X, Squeak (Morphic)...
Morphic is something like an OO-framebuffer. It's not just pixels on the screen like most other GUIs but everything you see is an object (a Morph) that can be manipulated and assembled into more complex entities like dialogs or menus or whatever. You can learn about the Morphic philosophy in the numerous Self papers (http://www.sun.com/research/self/)
> - where can I find resources to MVC/Morphic GUI building, until know I could not find anything in the Web bigger as 5 pages.... (but of course, I've not seen al :-(((
There are tutorials mentioned at www.squeak.org, also there is some on this Swiki, and you could buy the first Squeak book (see Smalltalk books). As for MVC, any old Smalltalk book should do. – Bert Note: a link to another page in this swiki is just the name of the page between single asterisks, like so: *Squeak FAQ* (just be sure to spell and capitalize the page's name correctly - double the asterisks to display an asterisk like in this example); and for links to other sites or to create a mailto: address, just enclose the URL in single asterisks.
I also came from C/Java. I did the bank account tutorial. It is a good tour of what can be done. I asked John if he would do a "part 2", to evolve it into more of an application.... Hope he does...
Greg Banschbach (glbny@yahoo.com)
Im new to squeak and just grabbed it. I tried to use scamper to view some of the various demos and was confronted with "Error: a primitive has failed" searched the net for solutions but havent run across any yet. Running XP any ideas ?
As a side note, I just tried scamper on the same network with a Mac running OSX and everything works ... perhaps this is something for the bug list not the newbie page ...