In case you didn't notice, with the source code of Scratch now being officially (pre-) released, you've gotten everything you need to create your own command blocks for Scratch (and much more). Once you know a little bit of Smalltalk you can go right ahead and do fantastic things with Scratch!
To get you started I've composed a little tutorial that shows how to add a new type of command block to the blocks palette:
http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/Jens/75626
To find out what this is all about check out John's announcement here: http://scratch.mit.edu/forums/viewtopic.php?id=2745
and refer to the links in that post for further information about the source code release.
Now here's a caveat: You actually need to be pretty proficient in Smalltalk to really know what you're doing, but hey, In Smalltalk - as in Scratch - you'll learn by programming!
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Great! This is really interesting and can really bring out how Scratch is/was made.
Just a reminder that if you make your own blocks and save it in a project then you can't upload the project to the web. Look at the link for 'John's announcement" above.
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MESclan wrote:
Ok i'm getting sort of frustrated.. when i do the delete open thing to open it it doesn't work. and I have NO IDEA how to get the source code open. do I need squeak?
I do believe you do have to download Squeak first, before I had the source code open, that's what I did. I do not know for sure, but it would make more sense to download Squeak first anyways. After downloading Squeak, download the "Scratch source code". After you do that, just drag and dropped the "Scratch source code Image File" onto the Squeak file and it will come up with an error, click OK and it will go away. When you come to the point of seeing the error, just ignore it. By now, yo should have Squeak on your screen. That's all there is to it, Have fun programing and researching with Squeak, and SQUEAK ON!
Last edited by BrainstormInc (2008-01-12 15:30:39)
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Hi MESclan,
I'm glad you mastered the 'flip'-tutorial and I'm sure you've learned a lot about Scratch and Squeak in that process. I'm very sorry that you got frustrated at some point. Just three hints:
1) You don't need to download Squeak, all it takes is Scratch and the source code. You can start the Squeak development environment by dropping the source image onto the Scratch.exe (or *.app if you're using a mac).
2) If you want to avoid the error message at startup and see all the Squeak sources you'll need to download a file called SqueakV2.sources from the Squeak website (there's also a link to that file on the page where you can download the source code)
3) There's no need to go full screen, but if you want to anyhow, it's in the appearance menu.
Scratch (and Squeak) on!
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