Stephan Wessels has put up a very large tutorial showing the complete test driven development of a game in Squeak. It covers quite a few things new Squeakers will want to know such as using SUnit to do test driven development, using Morphic to create Squeak widgets, using the debugger, and packaging the code with Monticello. It's a great tutorial and I'm sure will become a popular resource.

However, despite the awesome effort (which I do appreciate), I have some problems with it. As with many other Squeak tutorials, it makes the mistake of using a standard Squeak image as you'd find on Squeak.org. This only helps further propagate the impression among newbies that Squeak is ugly, old fashioned, and lacking in all the features they expect from a more modern IDE. What you see in the screenshots is not a Squeak I'd use. Plain black code, ugly fonts, no intellisense, no use of the Refactoring Browser, no Shout Workspace.

Most developers who use Squeak would have a plethora of extra tools and utilities installed that make developing a much nicer experience than what you see in this tutorial. Do yourself a favor and start your Squeaking with a real developer's image loaded with all the proper goodies like the SqueakDev image maintained by Damien Cassou.

Squeak.org still hasn't figured out that its core audience should be developers, not children. They don't seem to realize the base image they distribute actually scares away more people than it encourages to join the community. Though they do have a link to Damien's SqueakDev image, they don't encourage it like they do the base image, a mistake that leads new developers to open up Squeak for the first time, browser a tutorial or two, and toss it aside as a silly toy, never having seen the real power or beauty that is Smalltalk.

So all you developers out there using Squeak, please, stop showing people ugly images. Marketing matters, looks matter, and that stuff scares people away. Load up some decent fonts, setup the minimum required goodies like Shout, the Refactoring Browser, and ECompletion. And if you aren't using these goodies, you should be, and you shouldn't be making tutorials without them because it gives people a false impression of what Squeak is. Squeak is an awesome development environment that sadly doesn't come out of the box that way, you have to start with the right box or learn to build your own.

Squeak.org could learn a lot about marketing Squeak by looking at how rubyonrails.org markets Rails. If there's one thing Ruby does vastly better than Smalltalk, it's marketing. Smalltalk continues to languish not because of technical merits, but because of bad marketing. Beaten by Java, and now beaten by Ruby, by marketing alone.