Scratch

I have found many discrepancies between the Scratch development environment and the Java applet that runs the projects within your browser. Even though the Scratch team works very hard to reduce this problem it is to be expected and will never completely go away. I believe it to be critical to a projects success that it functions without downloading. Downloading should be primarily for remixing, importing and in general examining the code of a project. 

And so it becomes the responsibility of the project author to overcome this gap between development and deployment. This is where I begin to become frustrated with the process. The only way to get the project into the Java applet is to share it. Since you may share a project only once you are forced to share your first draft. This version may not even function and your moment of glory as a new project has passed away forever.

Of course you will fix the bug but by then it is too late. A successful project is like an avalanche. A huge amount of energy is released from a very modest start. But because you were forced to share your first draft that start will never happen.

I would like to suggest a feature within the development environment that generates an HTML document on your local hard drive. Executing this file would open your browser and show thumbnails of all of the projects saved on your hard drive. Clicking a thumbnail would then execute its respective project within the Java applet. This would allow debugging without posting and should drastically improve the quality of new posts.

A less attractive alternative would be to allow users to upload projects for private access. Once they where happy with there results they could make the project public. The project would only be a new project the first time it was made public. The drawback to this is wasted time and bandwidth but it may work better for applet versions or licensing reasons.

Thank you for your consideration.
Axorion

Last edited by axorion (2010-09-18 17:14:01)