Well we have some great news for you today. Because Vassili and Sam are so overworked with Pollock and Splash and all the other bugs, such as the gray-window while resizing bug and other speed issues, we've stepped up and have fixed -all- of these issues.

Pollock is now complete, along with WithStyle v10 and a replacement for Firefox and IE. All of the drawing bugs are fixed, as well as the speed issues. Splash is available for download from the public store already. All of it is open source.

As well as that, we've also done most of Chagall on a cross-dialect framework called Spoot. This framework means we can port Pollock, Splash, WithStyle v10 and BottomFeeder to Dolphin Smalltalk, Squeak, Smalltalk/X - but not VA (it doesn't support continuations).

We're also doing all the tools rewrite for VisualWorks, so watch out for those hyperlinks .. everywhere. The VM is now only 76k of disk space due to the removal of all the GUI C code. Also, floating point boxing and unboxing is now possible because SWS has also contributed a working AoSTa built off Exupery. This has yielded in a 500% speed increase for all VW applications (which will be back ported to VW5i4) now making Smalltalk the fastest language on the planet.

We've also just signed a deal with AMD and Intel to include Smalltalk bytecode instructions on the CPU chip, which will give Smalltalk a further speed increase. Unfortunately, we were unable to do anything about Store - even with all the speed increases, it's still slow. We suspect it may be due to the recent port from raw database access to Glorp, but this is uncomfirmed at this stage.

BottomFeeder will also now come as part of the base image - but never fear, we've also optimised all the bytecodes and parcels so that the SRE now works! Yes, the base image is a measly 403k - I know, still too big, we're working on that. With Bottom Feeder included, we've transformed all class access in to RSS feeds, so you can subscribe to Bundles and Packages instead of loading them from store.

Great times ahead for VisualWorks and Smalltalk! Keep the innovations rolling.