Scratch

Jens wrote:

Snap! alpha update:

Virtual keyboard and pinch zoom for iPads are now available in a first (still rough) version in the current alpha build.

Enjoy!

Cool! That's quite amazing. I just tried it on an iPad, and my only problems were:
—Menu items are too small to pick accurately
—If you open up touch screen settings, you get a slider wherever you try to type
—When resizing, via pinching, the screen develops gray boxes in places (maybe that's a problem with your dirtyrect algorithm)

How did you implement that native keyboard support?

Jens wrote:

don't switch to mobile settings, you'll get the virtual keyboard anyway. I'm working on a conflict-free way for context menus, then pinch gestures should work much better. Stay tuned!

But the context menus are better with mobile settings.

Hi Hardmath, thanks for the article on Morphic, it's actually not bad at all!

Jens wrote:

Snap! alpha update

after Brian's suggestion I've changed the Morphic gesture for invoking context menus on touchscreen devices to (single finger) tap-and-hold (which makes pinch-zoom work better), and also done my best to get rid of "greyed out" areas when the virtual keyboard is shown.

Personally I now find it a lot easier to work with Snap on my iPad. I'd be interested in your experiences.

Thanks, and Enjoy!

Ah! Just got out my iPad and tested it out, it's much better now. Though maybe you should disable the pinch-zoom functionality, you don't really need it. 

On a heavier note, My iPad sorta crashed when I created an infinite loop warp, maybe you should try to catch infinite loops? 

xly wrote:

@Jens
On my tab the drag-n-drop method is slow and touchy.
May I suggest you a different way to move palette block onto the script area ?
Select a palette block by clicking on it , then click on the position of the Script Area where you want to move it (no more dragging) .
Then you move the block inside the script area as usual.
Anyhow you have succeeded in making the proof of the concept .
Wonderful !!!!
I'm going now to make a test with a physical keyboard

That would be a great way to move things on tablets and PCs. But drag-and-drop shouldn't become completely obsolete. 

I am the bad boy of the class with my Android Tab.
Anyway, I'm happy to communicate the surprising result of my experiments.

With my PC (Windows XP) I use an inexpensive Logitech wireless solution Mouse +  Keyboard + Usb dongle. When I connect the Logitech dongle directly on the Usb connector of my Acer Iconia Tab 500, the mouse and the keyboard are immediately recognized and active. I can play with Snap! like a charm (+ Chrome) almost as easily as with the PC !!
I've still minor problems, because Android does not recognize the French keyboard (I'll fix that by buying an american one). Another issue is that the right-click is not recognized and thus I can't activate the "Make a block" instruction (this could be replaced by a palette instruction ?). On top of that the "Export file " feature works but right now I don't know how to save the text appearing in the "xml window".
I am going now to try to Import one of my Snap! projects.
I shall report.

Last edited by xly (2012-05-24 02:39:22)

Jens,

I might have hit a bug in BYOB. I have a sprite that moves around the stage cleaning up dust. BYOB crashed with a message:

"Failed to open Midi ouput device Micosoft Midi mapper
・V・X・e・€・ﾉ・h・・・C・o・ｪ・C・・・X・g・[・・・ｳ・・・ﾄ・｢・ﾜ・ｹ・・・B"

Note I have a Japanese operating sytem and I suspect the second line of the message looks gibberish because of the encoding.

If this is a genuine bug should I make a bug report through Bugzilla?

Graham

Hi christian2000, what you're seeing is Scratch's ASK prompter invoked from the stage, not a BYOB bug.

Hi Jens,

I'm using Windows Vista Home Premium.

Thanks, Graham. I'm sorry you're having problems with BYOB. I don't think this error has anything to do with your Windows' locale setting, apparently it tries to access a MIDI output device. Maybe you're using a special MIDI device? In this case you could try a different one or resetting your MIDI options to the Windows default. Anyway, since this is an off-the-shelf Squeak VM we're using for BYOB (the same one Scratch is using) we're probably not going to debug it at this stage of Snap development.

rookwood101 wrote:

I know you guys don't like us complaining about features, but I found something that could be useful for the midi blocks in snap: http://mudcu.be/midi-js/ 

That's not complaining, that's offering a great solution!

Hardmath123 wrote:

maybe you should try to catch infinite loops? 

Sadly, this is theoretically impossible.

We could catch certain special cases of infinite loops, of course, but that has to wait until we can put some time into error handling in general.

But, doesn't pushing the stop button work?

@jens, the stop sign is disappearing on windows. ubuntu works though 
maybe replace the unicode with bitmaps?