eWeek's Peter Coffee took a look at Cincom Smalltalk VisualWorks recently, and had a talk with Suzanne Fortman and I. He's got it written up in this week's issues, which should be out today. He has some nice things to say about the product, which he installed using the NC CD:

Version 7.4 of VisualWorks became available at the beginning of this year, offered in both a supported commercial version and an unsupported but full-function noncommercial version that can be downloaded at smalltalk.cincom.com.

VisualWorks offers developers a capable tool set with a remarkably long list of contributed components and utilities that are supplied under varied license terms.

Versions of the 7.4 release on Microsoft's Windows XP and Apple Computer's OS X delivered a polished development experience in eWEEK Labs tests on both platforms, with well-paved pathways for interactive graphical interface development and efficient packaging of finished applications for convenient deployment.

I got a couple of quotes, and BottomFeeder got a mention as an example of cross platform deployment:

After one of the Labs' past development "Shoot-Out" competitions, we reported that watching a Smalltalk developer recovering from an error was like watching someone perform brain surgery on oneself. But Smalltalk has since become somewhat safer for journeyman developers with the addition of such features as namespaces, as we learned from Cincom product manager James Robertson, in Cincinnati, during a conversation with the Labs late last month.

Robertson brings a developer's perspective to his work. He's better known to the open-source community as one of the lead developers of the BottomFeeder news aggregator client for the RSS and Atom protocols.

Very nice stuff. I'm located in Maryland though :)