Scratch

I agree with Kevin. Just have a look at how this website is evolving along the suggestions of community members!

Also, as far as the Scratch language is concerned, consider the new ability to let a sprite query another sprite's attributes and variables, the introduction of 'volume', the shift to 'beats per minute' in musical command blocks, the 'rest for _ beats' block, the new mathematical functions (esp. trig) and the ability to translate Scratch. All of these new features have been requested and discussed by members in this forum. All of this also indicates, that the Scratch developers are much more open for - even sudden - changes due to comunity suggestions than is your impression.

What the Scratch developers indeed seldomly (if ever) do, is join into a public discussion about what 'should' be done to Scratch or not. Personally I don't regard this as a sign of lack of interest, but rather as a polite and gentle way of not overwhelming the community with their own opinions.

Of course there are many impatient members - myself included - who can't wait for some new features to be included in Scratch (e.g. arrays, movie support, midi files) and would love to 'hack' such things themselves. It will be fun to observe such experiments once the Scratch source code is made freely accessible.

Generally, it seems that the scratch team doesn't know themselves exactly what will be in each release.  They are working on many things, and which ones will be ready for a release are not always clear.  For example, they thought they would release comment blocks in v1.2, but they backed off on that, and the way tempo was handled was changed (for the better) between v1.2beta and v1.2.1.

When the Scratch team has said that they'll do something, some people on the forums have gotten very impatient.  Perhaps they just want a little time to do things right, without people breathing down their necks!

This isn't about my suggestions - its about the many I see from others that just seem to

In short, we do care a lot about your opinions.

I believe you do - the trouble is - it is just a belief - we have nothing to indicate whether (in majority of cases) suggestions are being seriously considered or not.  People think they've made a good suggestion but have no idea whether the Scratch team think the same or not.

The latest example is the previous costume requests - there has been no comment from the Scratch team (AFAIK :- )

This seems (to me at least) to be a no-brainer - either the Scratch team think - oh - YES - of course we should have it - silly us for missing it out - or - they think - NO - we have a good reason for not having such a block.

Now, either way, I'd have thought the team could indicate their thinking.

This is just the last example I've noticed - don't intend to bring the discussion of the merits of that item here - just the process :-)

regards

Simon

PS I love Scratch and applaud the team for their efforts - my posts are intended to help by prodding and pushing progress - I'm battling (hopefully in a nice way!) on behalf of the younger Scratchers here :-)

That discouraged me in particular to reply to people's suggestions. Also, sometimes I feel like some suggestions are good in general but not the highest priority. I don't know how to convey that message in a way that doesn't discourage people from suggesting things. It takes a lot of time to answer those things in a thoughtful way.

Well, as an optimist (most of time anyway) I like to think that most problems (apart from War and Poverty in the world) can be solved :-)


My suggestion would be a web page(s) that had a short description of feature request, maybe a link to forum thread, an indication of likelyhood of incorporating into next release (1- 10 1 no chance - 10 definite) and some comments as to why it won't be if not high on agenda or why team think it a great idea and they'll bend over backwards to try and implement it :-)

Thats just my 2 cents worth- I'm sure something better could be arranged :-)

regards

Simon

I agree with SimpleScratch that the change process should be MUCH more transparent.  I am discouraged enough to the point that I am no longer participating in most of the "suggestions for improvement" that appear in the Forum.  I don't know what to say...many of these suggestions appear again and again...it gets tiresome to simply say "Yes, this is a good idea.  I hope it is implemented some day too.  You were smart to think of it."  It would be much better to be able to say "Take a look at change request #489 (currently scheduled for release in 2010) and see if that will do what you are asking".

I believe it's good to have discussions about suggested features, and I share some of Paddle2See's exhaustion about commenting the same suggestions again and again while second-guessing the developers' intentions.

Personally I find Scratch to be a very mature product, with no immediate need for frequent / major add-ons. Internationalization, on the other hand, looks like a very desirable effort to me, and full UTF-8 support can probably only be appreciated by a non-English native speaker    . It is also something amateurs (like me) simply cannot accomplish.

Among several reasons I am so enthusiastic about Scratch is that I cannot remember *ever* having browsed Smalltalk code that was *so* well written as Scratch is (I could go on for days in praise of Scratch's guts...). I'm also very happy with Scratch *not* being a community-driven development project. Just look what has happened to Squeak: The squeak.org community has all but developed Squeak to death, bloating up and slowing down the code base with half-baked, unfinished and poorly documented layers upon layers of complexity (please don't flame me for this, fellow Squeakers...). So, again please, let's *not* have community code in the official Scratch image!

I'm perfectly happy with the generous Scratch Source Code license. It allows us to publish (experimental) community versions based on Scratch, and the Scratch Team is even actively supporting it. What could be better?

So, while we're all waiting for Scratch to mature gracefully why not inspire the Scratch-Team with some more suggestions and possibly even some changesets (user configurable blocks, anyone?)...

a simple "thats an interesting proposal we might consider" would be nice occasionally to show that at least someone from the scratch team has notice the suggestion even if they do not give opinions on the idea.

Hi everyone. Sorry if it feels like no one is listening to your suggestions! We truly appreciate your interest in Scratch!

Here is my view on the issues:

What you are asking requires a lot of time on Product Management. Having deadlines, release dates, Gantt charts, etc...  it starts to sound like, for the outsider, Scratch is like a commercial product or an open source project. Scratch is interesting because it is neither of those! Yes, the code is there fore anyone to change but we are not managing a community of developers and taking their changes (for multiple reasons, one of them is time and another is what Jens mentioned).

In the Scratch team there are only two full-time people working on the code of Scratch. It's not thousands of people like in a product from Microsoft, or an army of open source developers like in Firefox. Any of those models has pros and cons, and so does our model.

A lot of us in the Scratch Team are graduate students, myself included, who left jobs working on commercial software to work on a meaningful and open-ended project like Scratch. We are really passionate about technologies that empower people and spread certain educational ideas and a little less about feeling like we are working on a commercial product with tight deadlines and so on...

For example, I worked with others on the on-line community aspect of it as part of my masters thesis. I am now trying to explore other areas for Scratch but I find myself spending a lot of time just browsing the website, fixing bugs and working with the IT people on the health of the website.

We are also busy with other aspects of being a graduate students and juggling tons of other projects and activities, some of them related to Scratch, but not necessarily visible to the outside world. A lot of us are more interested in the academic research aspect of Scratch as opposed to the day to day things related to Scratch, but yet we spent time trying to manage the community, distributing Scratch Boards, running workshops, etc.

A few months ago we decided to search for a Project Coordinator who will be able to be more of a spokesperson for Scratch.  I believe she will be joining in May and we hope she will be able to communicate in a more detailed fashion what's going on inside the group as well as collect your suggestions.

That was probably too long of an answer but I hope it gives you an idea of what's going on.

If John and Evelyn have some some spare time (although they are probably too busy right now working on Unicode support) they might be able tell you what other features might be coming. But let's not take too much of their time!