Twitter and friends

I need something that:

• lets me keep a list of paper that I want to read
  
• lets me keep notes with the probably unrealized ambition of turning them into articles
  
• lets me have short public chat like conversations with my peer group about the links and stuff
  
• lets me discover content based on my preferences, i.e. buttons, "go away", "later", "was good" for articles and links
  
• it collects data from around the web so that one place has info from various sources.
  

The thing is that some links articles last. You want to return to them again and again. E.g. an interview by Matz on the design of Ruby, or a discussion of the history of smalltalk optimization over the last 20 years by Eliott Miranada. Other stuff, like -6% GDP growth or a joke with a friend are easily forgotten.

What's with the fascist text limit imposed by twitter anyway and how come it doesn't have a conversation view.

Confused by newspeak

Having downloaded and Newspeak I'm faced with the same difficulty that I usually get when trying to start with smalltalk; culture clash. The world is unfamiliar and I don't know where to begin. To be sure Newspeak is much more familiar than Squeak; it has a browser like interface that behaves rather like a browser window and buttons whose icons make sense. There's still some rough edges like for example pressing tab doesn't change focus to the next control, but if one is prepared to use the mouse once can get around the UI and inspect the code.

But where to begin. Following the tutorial I found myself looking at a combinatorial parse and looking for simple function to understand. It's all a bit alien, gone is the familiar assignment operations, they're replaced by a double colon operator:

 pos:: 0

which does assignment. But one can learn syntax. Looking at a simple function that is producing an error message it says something like:

 or:: ifTrue: [msg2 ifTrue: 'or' ifFalse ''] msg1 ifFalse: '' .
 ^msg1 . org . msg2 .

which took me much longer to parse than the following would.

 if msg1 && msg2 then
   msg1 + "or" + msg2
 else
   msg1 + msg2
 end

or even

 [msg1, msg2].selectNotNil.join(' or ')

So I'm suspicious that the syntax is actually a good syntax. I think there should be syntactic sugar.

But these differences I understand. Where I'm lost is how do I interact with this system, how to I run code and execute it, where do I start making classes and what libraries do I have at my disposal. Where is my familiar command line where I can type in commands and have them evalulated when I press something like return or control-return.

I think I need a tutorial in which one creates a real application that does something, for example an application which checks on the price of a book on Amazon. That would show how to use the network layer, how to create a simple GUI window, how to loop in the background etc.

Well perhaps there is such a tutorial out there. I'll have to keep looking. For now, not being able to tab around the UI makes using Newspeak rather difficult on Eepc.