Smalltalk Labs

I’ve worked over the weekend to get a pre-release version of Smalltalk Labs Browser for blogs (I should really have chosen a shorter name for this one although really long product names are kind of funny) ready, exclusively for the newest episode of Pharocasts.

Head on over there now with a WebKit or Mozilla powered browser if you’d like to play around with it: http://www.pharocasts.com/2010/11/lightsout-game.html

If you use an unsupported browser, you won’t even notice that SLBfb is there, because then the class names that would usually be clickable to open the browser are replaced with pure text. This means if you put this on your website or blog you don’t have to tell your readers that it only works in WebKit and Mozilla browsers, they won’t even notice it’s there if their browser isn’t supported. I think that’s a rather nice solution. I might add support for Opera later on.

The design changed a bit since the last video I posted. I removed the area at the top that displayed the class comment so that there is more space for the list, which now holds the class comment, class definition, instance and class methods.

You can click on “hide list” and the list slides out of the way so that the full view space can be used to browse code. The public release version will probably allow you to move around in the list by using your keyboard in this view and additionally I might display small clickable controls to do that without the keyboard, so that even in full code view you can switch to the next or previous method.

This Pharocasts exclusive pre-release version doesn’t yet communicate with a backend server which holds all the source code for Pharo and other Smalltalks, that part I got only finished today. Thanks to the awesomeness that is Google App Engine, I barely had to do write any code which is nice ^^

You’ll be able to add this to your own blog (or any kind of website) very soon, probably even tomorrow. As always, never believe release dates when they come from me or any programmer for that matter, but it should be ready tomorrow. It works on most popular free blog hosts, including Tumblr and Blogger, the only requirement is that you are able to include custom JavaScript in your blog or website’s theme. SLBfb itself is hosted on Google servers so it should always be blazingly fast to load. Gzipped it’s only a bit over 1 kb in size, 6 kb uncompressed. Adding this to your website is so easy a two year old could do it although I’m sure I’ll manage to make the instructions look seriously complicated (it’s a gift).

I had wanted to make jQuery an optional requirement but since then I’ve used it for so many parts of SLBfb that making jQuery optional isn’t really that good a decision anymore. But I made sure that if you use some other JavaScript framework already, jQuery won’t interfere with it. jQuery is served from Google’s servers and cached in the user’s browser. Most websites do that now and this means that usually, jQuery does not have to be downloaded more than once so this doesn’t really add to the page size since people usually already have jQuery cached from visiting some other website in the past. So all in all, even though jQuery is now a requirement, it doesn’t really matter and you can regard it as a non-issue.

If you have any issues with the pre-release version on Pharocasts or have suggestions for improvement or additional features, feel free to comment here or send me a Tweet @HaiColon or an email, HaiColon at gmail dot com.