Scratch

markyparky56 wrote:

jstout wrote:

Helloher wrote:

That's a good point, I suppose. However, I feel that it could help Scratch be more asthetically pleasing,, and if it were to be implemented with a feature to have it on or off, it would prove to be a quite popular utility. Sorry to be so blunt, I'm in a hurry.

I was at a meeting the other day introducing Greenfoot to computing teachers and someone made the comment that Greenfoot was nicer, more technical, looking than Scratch!

John

I don't see how, since greenfoot is text-based, scratch is blocks so obviously the programs would need GUI's, greenfoot is similar to scratch, but its sort of... less advanced. They're hard to compare.

Well the code is text based, but the appearance of the interface looked nicer, sharper, I think is what they meant. I was very surprised but I'm afraid I didn't challenge her.

John

markyparky56 wrote:

combining byob with panther will be complicated since it already has CYOB, ofcourse it would only require re-wording the button but it might slow BYOB/panther down a lot...

Yes speed is a concern for us already.  As for BYOB vs. CYOB, just imagine if we could combine Elements blocks with BYOB custom blocks!  I don't think this is anything we should rush into but it's worth starting to bat ideas around.

TheExternal wrote:

hey, does anyone know how to make byob open as the latest version installed automatically when its clicked? I have to drag the image file to the program to open up the latest versiion i have and that is a propbem for me when im trying to open projects made with a higher version of byob.

i'm using windows and my default version of byob is 2.99.007

If you install each new BYOB.image in the same folder where you have you BYOB.exe or BYOB.app, then running the application will open the right image.

I keep an alias to BYOB.app on my desktop for convenience but the actual app is in the BYOB 2.99.007 folder (but since I update BYOB.image it's not running 007 any more despite the name).

We were planning a new full release (the whole folder with everything in place) yesterday but had some last-minute issues that will mean a couple of days delay.  The new features in last night's release will give you an idea of what the issues are; if we switch to this new way of handling higher-order reporters it'll mean changes to all the supporting tools and documentation.

TheExternal wrote:

bharvey wrote:

TheExternal wrote:

hey, does anyone know how to make byob open as the latest version installed automatically when its clicked? I have to drag the image file to the program to open up the latest versiion i have and that is a propbem for me when im trying to open projects made with a higher version of byob.

i'm using windows and my default version of byob is 2.99.007

If you install each new BYOB.image in the same folder where you have you BYOB.exe or BYOB.app, then running the application will open the right image.

well... i dont install them in the same folder but i've tried alot to do this: right click on BYOB, onpen file location, replace BYOB.image with the new one and no matter what it keeps on opening .007 as default. It's weird... shouldnt that work?

EDIT: okay, i just tried downloading it in the BYOB folder and it still doesn't work... the file shows up as .027 but it still opens up .007.

Just open the .image directky by double clicking on it.

^ I get the same problem

bharvey wrote:

soupoftomato wrote:

Whenever I have tried to download updates, it gives me an Adobe Folder, that I can't open. 

That's strange.  Sounds like you have a bad association with some file extension.  What file can't it open, BYOB.image, or something else?

If BYOB.image, try right-clicking on it, choose "Open with" or "Send to" depending on OS, then choose BYOB.exe if you have it, or Scratch.exe in a pinch.  Or just drag BYOB.image onto one of those.

It says that it can't open BYOB.image because there is a damaged or lost file type.

shadow_7283 wrote:

I'm finding the feature that turns a held left mouse click into a right mouse click irritating.

Yes I totally agree.

Could you please file an enhancement request at http://byobugs.com?  This is the sort of thing that I just take as one of those unavoidable laws of nature but of course it isn't and it's great that you're calling our attention to it.  File under UI/HCI.

Why don't you take the left-mouse-click-hold feature away, by default, for Windows computers, and keep it for Macs? Then users can change it on the edit menu.

Last edited by shadow_7283 (2010-07-08 09:48:38)

shadow_7283 wrote:

Do I really have to register? I noticed it says that the information I include, including my email address, will be visible to other users. I think that's just asking for spam.

Maybe it's not until you go to the registration page, but somewhere in there it's supposed to tell you about a guest account you can log into -- we made sure to do that so we wouldn't have to collect email addresses from <13-year-olds.  So, no, you don't have to register, but maybe you have to visit the registration page.

Thanks.

2.99.028

Jens wrote:

This release is aimed at getting stable again. It also has some pretty deep changes, most notably:

1) a new TypeInReporterSlot (explanatory demo project here). This slot behaves pretty much exactly like the regular round reporter slot, but it also lets the user type in a value directly (text or number). The new slot always evaluates to a reporter, if it has been edited it evaluates to a reporter that reports the slot's text. Dan, Josh, is this better?

2) pause and resume now works with interpolated blocks (GLIDE, PLAY NOTE, PLAY SOUND UNTIL DONE etc.). This was soooo hard, I'm so proud of this 

3) I zapped Scratch's Booean-to-integer conversion when you put the result of a boolean expression into a list. We have first class Booleans in BYOB and don't need this kludge.

4) Lists can now be compared using the ( = ) block.

5) Lists no longer compare to /false/.

6) going into (Squeak) dev mode should now work again

7) some little graphical improvements to the blocks layout

lots of other little changes I forgot about right now...

shadow_7283 wrote:

Neat! Any news from the Scratch team about adding BYOB support?

This 

shadow_7283 wrote:

Neat! Any news from the Scratch team about adding BYOB support?

I met with a bunch of them two days ago, and got a demo of a mockup of some of their 2.0 ideas.

I think I have to say that we're still pretty far from general agreement, although there are broad areas of agreement-in-the-abstract.

There will be some form of procedure definition in 2.0, they say, but, for example, one idea they had tossed around was to limit it to commands with no inputs, to keep it simple.  Where you end up, thinking along those lines, depends on what you mean by "simple."  I showed that defining a no-input command takes the same two keystrokes in BYOB as it would in their approach, so we do have that kind of simplicity, but to make those two keystrokes in BYOB you have to ignore a menu of other possibilities that wouldn't be there to confuse you in a stripped-down version.  To me this question answers itself because within minutes after defining a no-input command, their imagined user will be asking about inputs, I think!  And s/he'll definitely want to put the new block near the other motion/costume/sound/whatever blocks rather than off in the corner.

I was able to argue pretty forcefully that we've already encountered and solved pretty much all of the little UI issues that will arise if they try to invent procedure definition themselves, and that they should therefore at least take our design as a starting point if not as the ending point.  (I told them I didn't feel boastful saying this because it's all Jens's work, not mine.    )

There's less agreement about first class lists and first class procedures.  Starting with first class lists, the difficulty is that all Scratch lists are directly visualizable -- you click a check box and there the list is on the stage, where you can inspect every element.  Once we make complex structures, and once we make temporary lists that are just passed along from one reporter to another without being in the final result, that all changes -- this is why we had to invent a debugger, and it's true that list visualization in the debugger still needs work.  But we know how to solve the visualization problem, because of Andy diSessa's work in the Boxer language he invented, in which the visualization of sublists can be opened or closed individually so that a big complicated structure can be explored in a reasonably small space on the screen.  This is definitely coming in BYOB, maybe not by August but I hope so, and certainly soon thereafter.  Meanwhile, the Scratch Team are talking about inventing one particular data structure: an associative list, sort of like fullmoon's project on the BYOB web page, but out in the cloud.  My question was, why privilege this one structure?  Pretty soon someone will ask for a balanced binary tree, or for a directed acyclic graph, or something, and they'll have to keep either adding more special cases or saying "sorry, you can't do that project in Scratch."  They can avoid that if they build an extensible data structure in the first place, allowing users to build all those other structures as BYOB code.

By the way, their cloud associative list would work by having you log in and then get a reporter block that would take a word as input and report the associated value in your cloud-collection.  I pointed out that this is just a subset of the behavior of the Panther URL-to-page block, and that they should consider something like that as the underlying primitive capability.  They didn't want to make users parse HTML -- but first class lists would allow them to do the parsing for the user!  And for that matter you could set up special web servers that don't send back HTML in the first place.

Finally, they don't believe many Scratch kids will want to write code involving first class procedures.  I made the argument that even if not everyone uses the low-level RUN, CALL, etc., stuff, many more will be happy to have tools based on this capability, such as the FOR and MAP tools in the tools project.

So, I don't know, they didn't exactly say no to anything, but they weren't falling out of their chairs either.  They do pay attention to Scratch modders both as a source of ideas and, even more, as an important part of the Scratch user community whose needs have to be met, i.e., they worry about a migration path for modders as they move away from Squeak and into Flash.