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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Croquet first impressions
Feed Title: Michael Lucas-Smith
Feed URL: http://www.michaellucassmith.com/site.atom
Feed Description: Smalltalk and my misinterpretations of life
I look at Croquet as a potential new target operating system - with that in mind, how easily can I "live" in the world metaphor it creates? My impressions are based around this premise..
First off, the installation instructions left me a little worried. In the fine print under the download it said I needed Squeak 3.6. Why was this in the fine print? for that matter, why isn't squeak included in Croquet?
I went to the Squeak site and only found 3.7! I grabbed that version and crossed my fingers, hoping for the best.
What came next was squeak-gasm. I have never, in my life, fired up a squeak app and been greeted by such a nice looking UI - it was like I wasn't even in squeak. A few random clicks to bring up project menus confirmed that I was indeed still in Squeak.
The instructions then told me to download the latest updates. I did that - only one. I guess I'm an early adopter!. Then the next step required me to drag something from a tool area to use the program.
This is where a bit of Squeak knowledge goes a long way. By attempting to drag that tool, it immediately starts firing up things in the background, gobbling CPU and making you wonder what you've done.
At that point, a "morph" appears, a full 3d environment inside the morph in fact. This is impressive, if it were not for the weird UI step required to get it. Since I knew Squeak, I was able to bring up the halos and move my morph in to the middle of the screen.
Ontoward! In to Croquet I went. I was Alice. Now, I know the British have a thing for wearing womens clothing.. but.. any way, moving right along. Moving around proved to be challenge - the keyboard did not act the way I expected. Up/Down did some weird jumping thingy, while left/right did nothing at all. Space, nor enter did anything.. in fact, randomly smashing the keyboard also did nothing.
Left clicking on the screen caused it to think hard, then bring up a randomly non-descriptive set of tools that made matters worse if I tried to pick any - especially 'exit'. How could I move? I knew it was possible, because I'd seen it done on video. Finally, I made the spastic gesture of holding down the right mouse button while moving the mouse - Alice turned!
Isn't she smart? I could now move around by numbly holding the right mouse button down and patiently guiding her about the realm. Often you end up in front of a portal and left click - it downloads - or if you're unlucky, it thinks a bit and brings up the non-descriptive tools. More on these tools later.
At this point I started to feel a little lonely - as did my internet connection. I thought the point of Croquet was to interact with worlds around the internet? No such luck - it appears I was all alone in my strange little universe - not even a rabbit to follow. There was a floating clock though.
Further exploration got me turned in to a fish, confronted by portals that kindly told me they could not contact a url. Useful.. so I swam back in to the world of the british and explored some more.
It's at this point that the tools started to make the least amount of sense. One of them, if you pick it, will create a minature version of the world you're in that you can resize, spin around, etc, and generally watch yourself on. This is about as useful as shit on a stick.
A more useful one, also as non-descriptive as the rest, lets you make your own world. Unfortunately, this world is blue. Dark blue. I feel like the bad-colorscheme metaphor of Squeak has managed to invade the world of Croquet with all the wonderful choices of colours.
I'd say the biggest disappointment was the speed. My laptop isn't blaringly fast - it's a Centrino, 1.2ghz with 768mb's of ram. But Croquet jumped and jerked quite a bit. It's not doing the heavy graphics of a Half-Life 2 either.
I finally found the world with the waterfall - arriving there makes the water fall down for the first time. I wanted to walk up and 'jump' like in the video - but moving around was getting laborious - my right click finger was getting tired. I knew there was a quick way to jump in to the distance, but what it was for the life of me I couldn't remember.
At one point I found a spreadsheet program I could collaborate with. Moving up and down seems to be fairly hard as well.. so sharing this spreadsheet wouldn't be easy in reality. Getting to different parts of it requires zooming in.. moving it.. resizing it.. can you imagine three people fighting over the portal window just to get at different parts of the spreadsheet?
I couldn't see any obvious way to make any fancy portals myself.. I made a mirror at one point, that was cute.. but how do I back it up to a VNC session? show Word in it? make that spreadsheet.. dip in to Avi Bryants portal?
The world metaphor seems to break down at this point - how do you make content in this world? it's very unclear and not self-serving. Like MUD's, MUCK's, MOO's, etc.. this should be as simple as conjuring up an object and describing it, then giving it a bit of behaviour - all without leaving the world. These issues must be the rough edges not ironed out yet. Hopefully the next version will offer a more convincing distributed multiverse.
All that said - cool! This is great. It's more fun toying with the real thing than watching a video of Alan Kay enjoying it all to himself :) I can't wait to see where this goes in the future.
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