Is there any way to increase the size of the area the program runs in? Would this be a very hard thing to change/fix in a future release? Many folks have screens over 20" these days so it would be nice to take advantage of a larger screen area.
Great tool BTW hope the teams continues to add features. I've shown this to several of our code monkeys at work and they love it!
Cheers,
Jon
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Thanks a lot for telling people about Scratch. Code monkeys and beginners are all welcome :-)
The short answer to your question: no.
Long answer:
Having a unique size for the stage gives you the ability to share projects with other people without having to worry about compatibility. Also, the current size seems to be nice for the web. Also, I heard somewhere that the iPhone's resolution is the same size of the stage, coincidence? ;-)
While a good number of people have big screens with high resolution. Our goal since the begining is to make Scratch available for people in low income communities with limited access to technlogy. Most of these places, unfortunatelly, do not have 20" screens.
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There have been complaints on the other side also, that Scratch won't run on old 800x600 screens. The current fixed size is a decent compromise, but one that my have to be revisited every year or so.
Handling variable size would make programming in scratch more difficult (most likely), so currently seems like a bad idea to me (even though I too find the current fixed size never quite what I want).
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Being able to choose between a standard and large play area would be nice. Scratch is a wonderful thing and most folks are running monitors and hardware over 800x600 these days. I agree with not excluding lower end systems though. Everybody should get a chance to enjoy Scratch but a bigger sandbox would get well used I'm sure.
Cheers
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