Scratch
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#1 2010-02-18 11:30:15
*_* we need these!
Hey, trying to stand out here from the other posts. probably failing. ok, there are a few things that bug me with the current scratch setup...
1) every time you move or edit a costume, the costume tab sets itself back to the top. when you have a sprite that has lots of costumes, eg, numbers or letters, it can get pretty infuriating having to scroll down again to edit each costume! Please change this so that it either stays where you set the scrollbar or at least have an option to enable this.
2) I am sure you have heard several people complain about the new "dissapearing text" glitch, it is getting on my nerves, it can take a long time to get all the text back if you have a lot of text based sprites - as I discovered the hard way.
3) Have you noticed that if you put a variable on the stage, it will be wherever you put it when you reload the project? yes? well have you noticed that if you hide the variable behind something before you save, the variable will turn back to normal view and stick itself in the corner, no matter if it was in slider mode and in the centre of the screen or not. The X and Y positions need to be saved better in Scratch, I think variables should be treated more like sprites with a [set [variable 1] to x: ( ) y: ( )] block.
4) Lists are brilliant. however it baffels me as to why there is no [show/hide list [ ]] block, as there is for variables, all calculations and scripts running that use a list take much longer to carry out if the list is showing, even if the list is hidden behind something. Again, list X and Y position settings would be useful too, and maybe a length/width setting.
5) sometimes you really need two types or sizes of text, but you can't. you have to make seperate sprites instead. therefore more than one text box, or a textbox that allows more than one font or size would be very useful.
6) the almost traditional plea for a date and time block. It would open up so many possibilities. In fact, I got so desperate for this that I actually made one by editing the squeak source code. (thanks to Billyedward) and can now experience the usefullness of projects that change according to time (eg, day and night, calanders, rpg projects and acccurate timers.)
7) bring back or improve Netscratch, it was very useful and while working through things like Chalkmorrow's Snyff is fine, it's easier to use something that's built in.
8) encorperate Jens's little program that lets you open a project in full screen.
9) not a particularly nessescary suggestion I know, but orange is a pretty ugly colour compared to the usual colours of the rest of a project. maybe having an option to select a variable's colour could be encorperated in the variable's drop down menu along with the variable watcher type and slider min-max.
10) allow blocks like (length of list) to be dropped into the min-max of the slider settings so that the slider changes accordingly.
11) allow variables to be dropped into the list and variable parts of blocks, eg, [set [(count)] to (string)] and [(variable)] contains [thing] so that lists can be systematically searched and variables can be changed without using so much space.
12) in the paint editor, if you grab a section of the screen with the stamp tool, and then undo, your mouse pointer completely disappears. have it so that the thing you last stamped undoes but the screen section you grabbed remains the current stampable object.
13) a (colour [ ] is touching mouse-pointer) block would let a single sprite do the work of several (like a set of tick boxes) without defining x and y min and maxes to each box.
that's all that immediately comes to mind, please let me know what you think
regard,
Sparks
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#3 2010-02-18 11:50:31
- Bopitman99
- Scratcher
- Registered: 2008-12-15
- Posts: 500+
Re: *_* we need these!
Yeah, these are all pretty useful ideas, the scratch team should check this out 
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#4 2010-02-18 11:57:24
- steppenwulf
- Scratcher
- Registered: 2009-07-23
- Posts: 1000+
Re: *_* we need these!
Brilliant suggestions! I really hope the Scratch Team will see these and consider adding these as upgrades to the next version of Scratch.
I'm graduating HS this April and going to college in the Fall.
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#8 2010-02-18 13:48:08
- CloudTails
- Scratcher
- Registered: 2010-01-04
- Posts: 39
Re: *_* we need these!
Fast forward through music block! NEED SO MUCH (for when u can't find or make a shortened version) ^^
Warning: may induce laughter.
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#9 2010-02-18 14:25:08
- Lucario621
- Community Moderator
- Registered: 2007-10-03
- Posts: 1000+
Re: *_* we need these!
Unlike most groups of suggestions I've seen on the suggestion forum, in this specific one, I have to say that I agree to just about every single idea. They're seriously good ideas and they would have great possibilities.
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#11 2010-02-18 20:02:38
- MetharQuxid
- Scratcher
- Registered: 2009-10-14
- Posts: 100+
Re: *_* we need these!
One that would be nice for drawing projects on Scratch (for me) is for the sprite to set pen color to the color it's touching. I don't know, maybe not...
Dapper Slime.
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#12 2010-02-19 01:39:47
- Jonathanpb
- Scratcher
- Registered: 2008-07-25
- Posts: 1000+
Re: *_* we need these!
I agree with practically everything. 
"Human beings... must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.
-Charlotte Brontë
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#13 2010-02-19 06:22:12
Re: *_* we need these!
MetharQuxid wrote:
One that would be nice for drawing projects on Scratch (for me) is for the sprite to set pen color to the color it's touching. I don't know, maybe not...
that's a neat idea... what would happen if a sprite that was larger than one pixil was touching more than one colour? would you have the colour as the colour of the pixil at the rotation centre on that sprite? I only know a little Squeak myself so I don't know what's possible and what's not, but I know that boolean block like <colour touching> could only report one colour. for that matter, what would it report? reporting a little colour blob wouldn't work well because none of the other blocks would be able to use the information, so a method of defining all 16million colours in scratch would be needed such as a hexadecimal value for the red,green and blue in each pixil. then all the other existing colour blocks would have to be changed so that rather than a little colour box where a colour can be dropped, there was space to type in the RGB value of a colour. or to drop a <colour touching> block eg, [set pen colour to <colour touching>]
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#14 2010-02-19 07:29:30
Re: *_* we need these!
CloudTails wrote:
Fast forward through music block!
the chances of this idea being taken through depend on the way Scratch currently plays music. if you watch as you import an MP3 file into Scratch, first in converts it from stereo to mono and then it downsamples the whole thing. This suggests that the sound playing for Squeak/Scratch is currently very rhudimentary. One question I find myself asking is how much a fastforward block in scratch would slow things down. after all, Scratch now needs to be able to keep track of the playing positions of all of the sound tracks playing at one time and would have to be scripted to shuffle the start point around. I reckon that would mean a lot of scripting work for the Scratch designers. It would be interesting to see how many people requarly import sounds into their projects.
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#15 2010-02-19 10:14:39
Re: *_* we need these!
Wow! Mega wall of text. But a great wall, with lots of good suggestions. Thanks for taking the time to write all these up!
So: A bunch of these are already on our "to fix" list. But it's an open question as to whether we'll implement these fixes before Scratch 2.0 2.0 is a pretty big overhaul, since we'll be writing it from scratch (heh!) in a completely different language than the current version of Scratch. So that means we probably will spend most of our energy / time focusing on that, rather than fixing up old Scratch 1 code.
However - a bunch of these are about design choices (like make sure the costume list keeps its position, allowing variable watchers to have different looks). I'll make sure we have a link to this list (and other forum posts in suggestions / troubleshooting) handy during the early stages of 2.0 development.
In other good news - 2.0 will fix some old pesky issues automagically. You know how it's such a pain that the website player and Scratch will often show projects differently? Well - in Scratch 2.0, the code that runs the project in the Scratch editor and the code the runs the project in the Scratch player will be exactly the same -- which is way nicer! So now if we fix a bug in one, it's also fixed in the other.
Help Scratchers make the leap to 2.0!
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#16 2010-02-19 10:21:58
- steppenwulf
- Scratcher
- Registered: 2009-07-23
- Posts: 1000+
Re: *_* we need these!
Great!
I'm graduating HS this April and going to college in the Fall.
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#17 2010-02-19 10:23:15
Re: *_* we need these!
Lightinin: wow! that's great news! so you're moving away from squeak? what are you changing to? I just started learning squeak so if I know what 2.0 will be written in, I can get a headstart! Is there a loose release month we can all look forward to? and is it much different for you to program in this new code, easier/harder for the developers? Scratch is designed "to raise the ceiling, lower the floor and widen the walls" but I read that you are concentrating on "lowering the floor" more than anything else. Some people have, in response, suggested that different levels of scratch should be released so that beginners can move through the versions from ScratchBeginner to ScratchPro or something like that. What are your thoughts on that suggestion?
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#19 2010-02-19 14:34:17
Re: *_* we need these!
Yes!! ALL of these sound like great suggestions. (Number 1 especially!) Good job!
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#20 2010-02-19 15:30:31
- Lucario621
- Community Moderator
- Registered: 2007-10-03
- Posts: 1000+
Re: *_* we need these!
Lightnin wrote:
Wow! Mega wall of text. But a great wall, with lots of good suggestions.
So: A bunch of these are already on our "to fix" list. But it's an open question as to whether we'll implement these fixes before Scratch 2.0 2.0 is a pretty big overhaul, since we'll be writing it from scratch (heh!) in a completely different language than the current version of Scratch. So that means we probably will spend most of our energy / time focusing on that, rather than fixing up old Scratch 1 code.
However - a bunch of these are about design choices (like make sure the costume list keeps its position, allowing variable watchers to have different looks). I'll make sure we have a link to this list (and other forum posts in suggestions / troubleshooting) handy during the early stages of 2.0 development.
In other good news - 2.0 will fix some old pesky issues automagically. You know how it's such a pain that the website player and Scratch will often show projects differently? Well - in Scratch 2.0, the code that runs the project in the Scratch editor and the code the runs the project in the Scratch player will be exactly the same -- which is way nicer! So now if we fix a bug in one, it's also fixed in the other.
Awesome!!!
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#21 2010-02-19 16:59:20
- Ace-of-Spades
- Scratcher
- Registered: 2010-01-08
- Posts: 1000+
Re: *_* we need these!
My elbow is numb from me leaning on it and trying to read everything.
11110010100011010100011010101000100011011011001010111100101000110101000110101010001000110110110010101111001010001101010001101010100010001101101100101011110010100011010100011010101000100011011011001010
110101010010001010101010101010101010101010100110101010010101010010101001101011010101010010101010101
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did it go to sleep?#23 2010-02-19 17:05:26
- Ace-of-Spades
- Scratcher
- Registered: 2010-01-08
- Posts: 1000+
Re: *_* we need these!
No, just numb.
11110010100011010100011010101000100011011011001010111100101000110101000110101010001000110110110010101111001010001101010001101010100010001101101100101011110010100011010100011010101000100011011011001010
110101010010001010101010101010101010101010100110101010010101010010101001101011010101010010101010101
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#25 2010-02-19 17:11:39
- Ace-of-Spades
- Scratcher
- Registered: 2010-01-08
- Posts: 1000+
Re: *_* we need these!
Why would I get mad? o.O
11110010100011010100011010101000100011011011001010111100101000110101000110101010001000110110110010101111001010001101010001101010100010001101101100101011110010100011010100011010101000100011011011001010
110101010010001010101010101010101010101010100110101010010101010010101001101011010101010010101010101
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