Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Tue 11th Mar 2003 19:00 UTC, submitted by Mike Janger
Mike Janger writes: "What is Open Croquet? Alan Kay (one of the inventors of Smalltalk, one of the fathers of object oriented programming, conceiver of the laptop computer, inventor of much of the modern windowing GUI, etc.) is working on it. But what IS it? Have you guys looked into it?" I downloaded its 90 MB late last night. It's an 'academic' project featuring a futuristic OS 3D environment running through the Squeak environment on Windows or Mac. It requires a supported 3D accelerator (however, it didn't work with my Voodoo5 in hardware mode so it was painfully slow).
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...that it is an "academic project," as Eugenia wrote. This is going to be a testbed of ideas, not something people are likely to be using on a day-to-day basis. Think of it as the operating environment equivalent of the W3C's Amaya browser: Amaya always implements standards first, often before they're actually standards, and does really amazing things in theory, but in practice using it sucks teabags. It's a reference browser, but not a particularly usable one.
When you're looking at Croquet, look at some of the concepts they're working on, which are quite intriguing. When you look at it and think "Hey, this would drive me absolutely nuts if I was trying to use it for something as simple as organizing my Excel documents," even though you'd be absolutely correct you'd also be missing the point.