Scratch

I'll let Brian answer his version, here's mine:

We've been more or less constantly in touch with Mitch, John and the Scratch Team. I've made the first version of BYOB in 2008 while being an external contractor working on Scratch 1.4 for Mitch. Mitch and John put me in contact with Brian, when Brian was pressing for procedures in Scratch. I'd met Brian before at the first Scratch conference, but it was John who later got Brian and me working on BYOB together.

Mitch and John are also both on our advisory board for the NSF-supported curriculum development (BJC) which uses both Scratch and Snap!. We're very glad that they're letting us us remix their fantastic Scratch design, including features they've newly invented, such as cloning and turbo mode. And we're also proud to have pioneered some new features for Scratch, such as Build Your Own Block, and "Run without screen refresh".

Mitch has been extremely supportive and encouraging about Snap!, and we really consider ourselves and Snap! to be part of the Scratch community, not as something independent, even though we've (temporarily, I hope) parted implementation languages for now.

Yes, at some point I'll try to rasterize the SVG, since I'm not into such "hard math"    myself, but I'm playing with ways that'll hopefully not taint the canvas.

bharvey wrote:

II.  Custom Blocks
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It's crude, but the only way I know to replicate that behavior is to select the list, right-click and then "Adjust List Indents", and changing "Follow number with" to "Nothing". Then just use the space bar a few times as an indent.

Hardmath123 wrote:

If I want to create an HTML file in TextEdit, I just type out something in a plaintext document and save it as "something.html".

Except for the fact that OSX doesn't have a "create new text document" option in Finder. Which imo is much easier than opening up software just to create an html document.

UI designers have full license to take their software in whatever direction they chose, and personally I'm glad for the shift-lock-aspect-ratio decision. I would argue that if someone is so unfamiliar with a computer that they are unaware of this hotkey, that they have far more pressing habits to establish (namely on a Mac you can't delete a file with the delete key). If we're using Apple as the prime example for quality simplistic design, I would argue that the Windows 8 start screen fufills that design goal much better.

Oh, do you mean "Header" as opposed to "Heading"?

EDIT: Because the procedure is the same in the "Headings" format as long as you have a Numbering list.

Last edited by shadow_7283 (2013-02-18 11:37:11)

Jens wrote:

I'll let Brian answer his version

We have informal meetings with the Scratch Team all the time.  In the case of Jens and John, it's a nearly continual conversation.  I visit MIT at least twice a year, and we have wide-ranging conversations about the software, the web community, and our educational goals and plans.  The influences go both ways, although they're much slower to adopt a new idea than we are.  (That's not a criticism; it's why Scratch is so easy to use despite all the different things it can do.)  I wish they'd use zebra coloring!  It seems totally uncontroversial to me.  But I guess they value consistency over the readability of nested reporters.

It doesn't bother me as much as it once did that we're diverging in features and in user interface.  For a long time Jens and I hoped to convince them to adopt our ideas as a package, and we wanted to have as few differences as possible to have to resolve.  But it's now clear that, while open to thinking about our ideas, they're going to move very slowly on them, while focusing on other things.  (If you've heard Mitch speak, you've heard him talk about the Logo slogan "Low floor, high ceiling," and his idea that "wide walls" (meaning a lot of kinds of Scratch projects and media possible) are more important to kids than Logo's high ceiling.)

In some ways this is liberating for us.  We don't have to have every Scratch block.  Our (eventual) paint editor doesn't have to work exactly like theirs.  We can have a more permissive type system, and be more willing than they are to give error messages, which really helps the debugging of large projects.

I continue to worry that our parallel paths will end up hurting the community by dividing Snap! kids from Scratch kids, leaving Scratch as the "kiddie pool."  This hasn't been a problem yet because we don't have a web site where kids can share projects, but that's coming reasonably soon.  (Not incredibly soon; the first version of our web site will have only private storage, not sharing.)    But, we'll be discussing those questions with the Scratch Team, as we do everything.

Having said all that, I think almost all of their influence on us is embodied in Scratch itself -- Scratch 1.0 -- a work of genius without which we wouldn't have a project at all.  The Scratch Team were far from the first to invent a visual programming language, you know, but they're the ones who finally got it right.  There is a ton of design work in Scratch that you don't notice because they did get it right: Good design is invisible.  To the user, it just works.  More recently, I like to think that we're more of an influence on them, even though it's subtle.  Scratch 2.0 custom blocks take inputs because I bludgeoned them into it, I think, for example.

As of 2013, every major programming language has anonymous procedures.  (Java was the last holdout.)  Sooner or later, the idea will be so much a part of the programming culture, even among adults, that it'll seep its way into Scratch, too.  (I'm not saying I'll still be alive then, necessarily.)  Time is on our side!

Jens and I sweat blood over little details of the UI design, just as the Scratch Team do.  We just do it faster because there aren't as many of us.     I think our version of lambda is better than anyone's, even Scheme, because we took the brilliant Scratch visual metaphor and worked out how to let it help us teach the idea.  We didn't invent lambda and we didn't invent blocks, but putting them together wasn't totally trivial.  (I think Snap! does it a lot better than BYOB3 does, although even that was way better than a text representation could ever be.)

Okay, I'm rambling, I'll stop now.  Blame Jens for inviting me to talk about this stuff.      Bottom line:  We're extremely lucky to be their friends.

shadow_7283 wrote:

Except for the fact that OSX doesn't have a "create new text document" option in Finder. Which imo is much easier than opening up software just to create an html document.

Creating files is not the Finder's job. If it were, we'd end up with truncated lists of file types that never have the ones we want (like Windows!). If you're looking at the folder in Finder you can just drag it into a save dialog to save there.

Also, why would you want to make an HTML document and then not open software to edit it?

(namely on a Mac you can't delete a file with the delete key).

That's not what the delete key is for. The delete key manipulates text, just like all other non-command key presses. Command-delete performs an action (moving something to the trash, not deleting it), just like all other command keyboard shortcuts.

Try renaming a file (enter*) and pressing command-delete. It moves it to the trash. Now rename a file and press delete. It deletes text. Delightfully unambiguous.

*Yes, I know, not a command keyboard shortcut. Non-command key presses actually manipulate form fields, including focus (enter is really manipulating focus by activating the editor).

If we're using Apple as the prime example for quality simplistic design, I would argue that the Windows 8 start screen fufills that design goal much better.

Have you seen Launchpad? It's much nicer-looking than the Metro start screen, and it has interactive searching. The live updates on tiles (= Dashboard) are cool, but that scrollbar is horrible!

Steps I went through Brian:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

This is the epitome of interactive searching:


Sometimes when I'm coding large projects I make placeholder files for future use. Besides, with Explorer I can go [right-click,hover new, text document, rename] as opposed to [file, new, file, save-as, rename, type- html, enter].

Last edited by shadow_7283 (2013-02-18 14:40:29)

shadow_7283 wrote:

Steps I went through Brian:

Interesting.  There's nothing called "adjust list indents" in Mac Word, but what pretty much worked for me was choosing "modify" in the header format, choosing "tabs," and then setting a tab stop at 0.1 inch.  Sigh.  They should just understand that if you underline the text and you underline the number, you want the space in between underlined, too!

EDIT: ... but if you set the tab stop to zero, the text jumps way over with a huge (non-underlined) space in front of it!  Weird.

Last edited by bharvey (2013-02-18 18:13:22)

Fair enough. Though perhaps this isn't the most appropriate place for it, I think that constructive debate is useful for exposing flaws in different systems. For instance, I considered for the first time today that the removal of files with the delete key is inconsistent with the overall function of single key presses. I'm not going to be so foolish as to say that Windows is a flawless system, and I assume you wouldn't say the same about OS X. But I digress.
It's strange that Mac's Word doesn't have that option, but I am on Word 2013 so maybe OS X's next iteration will have it. Sorry I couldn't be more helpful. :\

Last edited by shadow_7283 (2013-02-18 19:26:30)

nXIII wrote:

…

This is a little too gnomic for me.  But just in case you mean "same to you," I wasn't meta-warring, I was teasing you.  It's different.   

Hardmath123 wrote:

make an entire project automatically

From a Scratch 2.0 project, you mean?  Or is this something else?  Anyway, send it to Jens!

nXIII wrote:

I think he's talking about this:

Oh.  Tnx.

@hm:  We're finished arguing about OS capabilities.  Now we're on teasing nXIII.