[self-interest] plans

[Jecel Assumpcao Jr]

As I was planning the next steps in the development of my project, I
saw that I had two paths that I could follow with the user interface
technologies:

 - do them as part of the overall tinySelf effort
 - implement them so that they would work on the standard Self 4.0 VM

The first option is easier since maintaining compatibility is always
a great time drain. The little thing of tracking why Self 4 would only
work with 256 colors that I did a while ago is a good example of this.

On the other hand, doing it in Self would allow people on this list
with access to Sun machines to try it out and even build programs
around it (making tinySelf and Self 4 *much* more compatible). The
technologies I am talking about are:

 - 3D GUI (with a very reduced dependence on X Windows)
 - "slices" selection mechanism
 - different input event system
 - multilingual cannonical strings
 - "agent scripting" platform

I can go into details about these, if there is interest (though
this is more related to my project than with Self). If I were two
implement this on Self 4.0, I could either do it as one big blob
(a new Snapshot, for example) or as separately loadable modules.
Which would be preferable? It would certainly be much harder to
make these changes independent.

-- Jecel


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