We’ve now made the first demo of our Squeak-based kids schooling environment and it’s been well received by the local community. Our work is specifically intended to work in a classroom environment and to have a Nepali theme throughout. It was done in rather a hurry and our heroic illustrator Om only joined us at the last minute but, hey, it’s great to have something to show people!

We did one have serious problem during our big presentation: out-of-memory errors while running on the XO. We’ve just spent the day tracking this down and discovered that the root cause is the large truetype fonts (point size >= 200) that we’re using. These consume a lot of memory in Squeak – an example project file quickly consumes about 65MB of RAM just to rotate a coloured/shadowed StringMorph in BitstreamVeraSans pt. size 200. In the demo itself we’ve seen upto about 200MB of unwanted heap expansion (annoying on MacBook, fatal on XO).

The good news is that if we remove the large StringMorphs from our activities then they seem to run with a reasonably-bounded heap size. The bad bit is that we really do want text in big letters and now we don’t have a neat way to get it! We’d sure be grateful if a Squeak guru would take a look at our example project and see if the heap expansion is due to a fixable bug (or tell us if we’re putting unrealistic expectations on poor little TTCFont).

If you’d like to try our demo you can install the Squeak runtime system (via yum, apt-get, or the Squeakland website) and then open the image file inside olenepal-demo-4.zip. (If you’re a developer you may also want to grab the olenepal-demo.4.changes.gz file and uncompress it.) Out of the box we’ve disabled halos and the world menu, but you can enable them by hitting Alt-k for a Workspace and then evaluating [OLE authorMode].

Tomorrow it’s time to go trekking over 10 days of the Dashain festival. When we’ll be back and we’ll need to quickly figure out how to shrink the image and split up the projects so that we’ll scale to many activities, how to use unicode Nepali text (Devanagari alphabet) inside Squeak and hook into multilingualisation, what audio format to use instead of Wave for our speech clips, and whether we can keep ourselves honest by making the whole shebang run nicely on our old B2 machines (which would also be great for demos since we only have one B4 to share). Not to mention implementing a lot more activities! Busy busy busy.

Happy Dashain everybody! And Squeak gurus, please leave us a comment to say hello and pass on your tips!