Scratch

Hi there!

I am terribly excited that you are asking about this 

Running Scratch in a networked OS X environment is... less than perfect. One of my major gripes has been with the default save location -- while 99% of apps respect the file-saving APIs and default to ~/Documents, Scratch doesn't. So yeah, it should really be doing a call to find the user's Documents folder, and defaulting to there.

(Saving documents inside the app's folder is a terrible practice, so that should probably be avoided. If you want to properly follow the OS X conventions, support files such as demo scripts should really be placed in ~/Library/Application Support).

While I'm here, could you please please please pleeeeease make Scratch respond to other system-wide API calls, such as user logout? I spend half my time in the lab trying to explain to kids why their computer refuses to log out -- it's Scratch, completely oblivious to what's going on.

Thanks! 

This request for opinions relates to the question I am desparately seeking answers for - installing Scratch in a PC network environment.

I am an educator hoping to start my school's first  Scratch class - an 8th grade Unified Arts class for 6 weeks.  If I log on to our computers, I can download Scratch - but then it doesn't show up for any student users if they log on to the same computer. Apparently, it wasn't created for a network environment?

If I download the Scratch exe file and put it on a shared network folder where students can access it and install it, it can't complete the installation because it apparently has to access the C drive in order to do so. Our student have mandatory profiles and no access to the C drive on any computers in the school.

Is there any information or experience that anyone else has to share? I'm so excited about sharing this software with my students and am just heartbroken at the thought that it might not be possible.

Saving to the documents folder (on a Mac) would be first choice; desktop, second.

Karen

On a Mac, I would like it to create a folder in the user's home directory called "Scratch Projects" and save in there.

This is what I do on my Scratch-equipped Macs.

While some people may choose to put documents in their Home Directory root, it is not a recommended practice; please don't make it the default. Here's a document you'll want to read (or have your developers read): Apple's File System Overview doc.

I work in a district where we have networked PC's and the majority are running Windows XP while we still have a few stragglers with Windows 2000. Students all have their own logins to the computers giving them access to their own network save space (i.e. their own Documents folder). We would like the default save location to be the user's Documents folder on the network space. The problem we are running into is the default save location is local computer, not the user's networked Documents folder. Any suggestions? For now we're having the students save to a temp drive that they have easy access to, although this is no where near the ideal situation.

Thanks for any help!

mrweston wrote:

wbtech: You can get to network drives by hitting the "Computer" button on the left of the Scratch save dialog; should be able to get at the user homes from there.

Thanks for the feedback. You're right, I can still access the user's networked documents folder from there, but then we run into a potential security/privacy issue with our students being able to access other student's documents folders. When I click on the drive I am brought to the list of all students in the school, so if we decided to have students navigate to their folders by this method, they would have to find their folder among all the other students. I'd just hate for Scratch to become a way for students to be malicious towards other students, intentionally or not.

wbtech: If, when presented with the list of all the students, your students are able to save into a folder that isn't their own, then you've got other security concerns to worry about. If they are logging into their own user accounts, then they shouldn't have write access to anyone else's directory, even if they can see them in the list.

That said, we're still having to deal with finding the right place to save every time; I hope this is a high priority fix for the team.

Hello everyone,

I have a different problem when saving.

Computers are all on Windows domain. Students all have individual logins which maps personal home directory (drive H . My documents folder is redirected to H:

When the student tries to save their work, the entire systems slows to a crawl. The mouse movement becomes jerky and it is virtually impossible to save. Every computer in our lab does this. Systems vary from PIII 500 - 1GHZ with 256-512MB memory - all Windows XP Pro.

Anyone else have this problem?

Thanks

Willy

On our school network if Scratch defaulted to "My Documents" the network SHOULD redirect this to their network home drive. Unfortunately it doesn't!
We use the ini file and restrict Drives to H. This means that a single click will take them to the correct place.

One more thing: an idea that the programming team is considering is having the Sample Projects be read-only within the Scratch programs/applications folder, and the default when saving a Sample Project is to save to the user's home/documents.

In my class (I'm a awesome techy, nerdy 10 year old in 4th grade), we have laptops and we use the same account. We go on a server and click our folder (it says our name and other students can access each other's folders. I always organize the folders    ) and we save our stuff there. other students need my help getting to their folder (they love me since im awesome at computers. well at windows comps) and it takes a while. we would like the default folder to be like the class folder and students can press their name and save. at home, on my windows xp media center SP2 laptop, i would like the default folder on a folder on my desktop (C:\Documents and Settings\Alex\Desktop\ScratchProjects) or on my memory stick (or flash drive or whtever.) like: F:\ScratchProjects . Or I could just pick whatever folder i want. i rather chose the first one.

at school we also have our own accounts but we never use them. i only use them

Last edited by alexpja (2009-02-10 23:26:00)