Squeak Group Buys Ship Naming Rights in Gaiman Novel

nadyne writes "Recently, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund ran an auction for the naming rights for a cruise ship in Neil Gaiman's upcoming novel Anansi Boys. Today, Neil Gaiman reported in a post to his blog that Markus Gaelli won this auction. According to Neil, Markus will use his hard-won auction to promote Squeak. He didn't tell us what the name of the cruise ship will be, but promised to do so in the future. Neil linked to Squeakland, although it's not clear whether Markus is associated with that site or Neil was just using it as a convenient starting point for his readers who might not know anything about Squeak."

Comments

Here is what the site says

[Nexboy]

It doesn't help much, but this is what the site says it's about:

WHAT IS SQUEAK? Squeak is a "media authoring tool"-- software that you can download to your computer and then use to create your own media or share and play with others. It is free and downloadable here. If you'd like to get a feel for what Squeak looks like without downloading, view a typical early project for kids in HTML (no download needed). Once you download Squeak you can use the Squeak Tutorials and download the handy Etoys Quickstart Guide.Further information can be found in the Squeak FAQ.

Re:Here is what the site says

[RevAaron]

Squeak has come up here a few times before. Squeak is an implementation of the Smalltalk programming language- the first fully OO language. It's where the WIMP (windows, icons, menus and pointers) GUI was invented, what Steve Jobs and his crew saw at Xerox Parc when they toured it.

Squeak has a lot of interesting media authoring capabilities in addition to the core language. In a lot of ways it's an OS running on top of whatever host OS you're running. It is completely binary compatible across platforms; not write once, debug anywhere like Java, but true cross platform compatibility with your binaries.

It runs on oodles of platforms: Linux/X11, Linux/DirectFB, Linux/SDL, Linux/SVGAlib, most any unix with X11, Mac OS X, Mac OS Classic, Windows XP/2k/ME/98/95, Acorn RiscOS, DOS, Pocket PC 2k/2k2/WM2003, WinCE 2.11-4.2, and probably a few more platforms I completely forgot. I develop for the Pocket PC in Squeak; I simply copy my image to my Axim via wifi and open it up- there's never any doubt as to whether or not it'll run ala Java.

Also see Squeak.org and the Squeak Swiki.

Re:Squeak as in Smalltalk Squeak?

[PissingInTheWind]

Smalltalk dead? Riiight.

Seriously, people don't know what they're missing. Quick example: one of the most advanced web application development framework around is coded under Squeak in Smalltalk: Seaside.

And people right now are wetting themselves over "Ruby on Rails", while this isn't even comparable in term of flexibility and power.

Pity the masses who ignore advanced programming languages technology.