[Etoys] Custom accessors for custom morphs

[Bert Freudenberg]

On Sep 22, 2007, at 6:54 , Derek O'Connell wrote:

> Thanks Matthew. I don't know the "correct" way to implement new etoys
> and as you have probably discovered there is little if any
> documentation for potential developers. This is a shame as I'm sure
> there would be a lot more of them by now (fully scriptable ones that
> is). According to others etoys is a demo that wouldn't die,

That's just Alan's own tongue-in-cheek characterization, he's always  
striving for a better thing.

> which
> maybe explains why no one seems to be going out of their way to
> support/promote their development. Which leaves me, at least, a little
> confused since etoys appear to be a well cited "feature" of the OLPC
> software.

Well, despite of it being intended as a short-lived experiment, it  
became quite feature-rich and even robust over the last 10 years. It  
is useful to a world-wide user community already and will certainly  
be one of the deeper activities available for the XO environment.

Given the limited man-power in our group and OLPC's schedule we had  
no option but to revive Etoys once more, give it a face lifting and a  
few prostheses to fit into the Sugar environment and here we are.  
There is, most unfortunately, no serious alternative. Except for the  
next thing we're working on, but that will take a few more years. We  
needed something now.

> Just glancing through etoy related classes leaves me a bit stunned at
> the moment :-)

Oh, most of Morphic is etoys-related, the "etoys" class category is  
just the tip of the iceberg. So I can feel with you ;)

- Bert -