I finally got serious with Smalltalk and installed VisualWorks 7.2 from Cincom on my iBook. Then I went through the walkthrough included in the documentation.

The installation basically went smoothly, as long as you read the installation instructions. :) This is a bit of a change for Mac software, but it's forgivable given that it's development software. The installation is on par with Eclipse.

One thing that might be confusing to people just starting out with Smalltalk is the fact that you need to pick an image right away -- or even what an image IS for that matter. If you start VisualWorks without an image, it opens a file open dialog (and doesn't specifically ask what it wants).

I picked the image file visualnc.im and that seemed to work OK. Just clicking on the image file instead works best; it just starts VisualWorks with that image. Reading the manual helps to clear this up a bit, but instructions for all of the operating systems are mixed together.

The walkthrough document is very well written, and explains a great deal of the environment and tools available by making a GUI application. I like how it explicitly shows the built-in "edit and continue" capabilities of Smalltalk -- you can modify a method while the application is running without requiring a recompile/restart. It's also neat how all of the methods are separated in the browser and you don't have all of the class' methods mixed together in one big long window.

I noticed that the SUnit unit testing framework and the test runner GUI come with VisualWorks. That'll come in handy when I start doing test-driven development.

My only gripe about the Mac OS X version of VisualWorks is the rendering of the OS X widgets, which definitely don't look native. Also, they are working but not complete -- for example, disabled text boxes look the same as enabled text boxes. I wonder if there is a more native looking GUI toolkit for Macs, or if there's something on par with SWT for Smalltalk: looks native on all platforms and has a cross-platform API.

Ambrai Smalltalk uses native widgets and they look much better. However the environment doesn't seem to be as complete as VisualWorks, and it's in beta at the moment.