The Open Croquet project released its public developer’s release today. OpenCroquet is a promising framework based on Squeak.
Open Croquet Releases Files for Download
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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……is this an internet based OS? i am teribly confused……
Take a little time to read the Introduction and the FAQ under “About Croquet” section in the page.
I have a *lot* of faith on this project. Those behind it are the founding fathers of graphical user interfaces as we know it today, and they surely intend to break the monotony and bring some innovation.
It’s kind of mind-bending that only current computers can really leverage technology developed back in the mid-seventies (Smalltalk)…!
I agree, this project looks like is has a lot of promise. Nice comment regarding Smalltalk as well.
It’s actually a good name as the whole project has a nice “Alice in Wonderland” theme that fits really well with the concept
Come on, it’s always better than dull names like “windows” (“hey, look, we made a window-based interface for ms-dos. Let’s call it.. uhm, don’t really know, let’s stick to windows 1.0 then something good will surely spring in our mind for next release”)
http://opencroquet.org/About_Croquet/screenshots.html
Quite amazing!
This is but a running joke among Computer Science pioneers: they *love* references to Alice in the Wonderland (which was respectfully mentioned in the Matrix series).
Squeak-Alice is the name of the 3D world builder which powers the Squeak Smalltalk VM for quite some time now. It’s based on the ideas of Alice from Carnegie-Mellon University.
Croquet is a new 3D world builder for Squeak, with an eye towards online collaboration. It employs techniques to help instant, live interaction between peers who work on the same project, even over great distances. Think of it as something that enables QuakeWorld multiplayer responsiveness, as opposed to that irritating lag found on regular Quake, to a collaborative 3D environment.
And both names are obvious puns at the AITW joke.
I hope this helps ya
(forgive me for any bad grammar; I’m not a native English speaker)
Astonishing! As a one-time Smalltalk developer myself, its great to see it being put to such a novel use. I love the concept behing the OpenCroquet interface – truly something to get excited about in the OS world.
But God is it ugly. I’d rather stay with the current desktop metaphor
Interesting. But in what way isn’t this just another 3D interface? Why so little bitching this time around? I guess the interesting part is who’s behind it. I’m sure Sun’s project Looking Glass (Another ALice reference) could really benefit from some of these ideas.
GJ
Ooops… I soke too soon…
I think ‘ugly’ isn’t really a correct definition at this point…
It’s not even an Alpha OS yet – not even pre Alpha – indeed I think all these guys are doing is playing with ideas….
When they pin the various concepts down, maybe they will get round to working on how things look too. The Alice thing is just something they can use to get things going for now.
GJ
I don’t think you guys get it….it’s not an OS, it’s more like a window manager, with collabrative content etc… embedded
But in what way isn’t this just another 3D interface?
Of course this _is_ a 3d interface, the point is an interface _to what_. Project Looking Glass takes the usual metaphore of a desktop and just slaps in another dimension. The utility of it is questionable to say the least.
Reading on their web site it’s clear that Croquet is _not_ an OS (it sits over an OS), is not a window manager and is not a desktop replacement (for the time being). It’s not supposed to help you organize your files and windows better “because it’s 3d”, nor does it suggest you to look at movies projected on a skewed window, when it would be better just seeing it face-on.
It’s a massively multiuser space with persistent data, mainly aimed, i think, at developing new metaphores for colaborative document editing and education.