Working on a dice simulator, a few ideas crossed my mind. The suggestions I present would not necessarily be helpful to everyone, but they have appeal from the programmer's point of view, in that they aim to make scripting more efficient and simple.
I'm almost certain some of these have probably been suggested before; pardon me in advance.
Additional rightclick option "duplicate (this only)"
This option would duplicate only the block that was rightclicked, rather than coming along with all the blocks below it. For lengthy scripts with repetitive sections, this would ease the extraction of specific lines needed elsewhere.
Drag-select boxes, draggable like blocks, with rightclick options "duplicate" and "delete"
Like the above, this would greatly help copying and modifying sections of a script without having to drag all of its lower contents with it. This would probably be harder to put into Scratch, however.
Show and Hide blocks for Lists
When you don't want your inventory displaying all the time, this would help. Variables have this, and since Lists are basically just a set of values rather than one, I don't see why it would be complex to do this.
Show and Hide as one block with dropdown
This is dubious, as adding it would necessarily mean either 1) messing up any and all projects with Variables (and Lists, if you add the previous suggestion), or 2) having some mechanism to change them all to the new block type. Nevertheless, it would be one less block type for Squeak to deal with.
Renamable Variables, Lists, and Broadcasts, with dynamic renaming
Totally pie-in-the-sky here, but by this I mean rightclicking a Variable/List/BC gives a "rename" option, and when one instance of the Variable/List/BC is renamed, they all are. (For some reason I originally thought Variables were already renamable, but checked when I started writing this and saw otherwise.) This really isn't necessary or useful and would, I think, be a pain to put into Scratch, but it sounded like a cool idea at the time, as did the previous suggestion.
I was also going to suggest multiple Timers, but I realized that could be emulated rather easily with a constant Set Variable script, and facepalmed.
Please discuss these.
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These all seem like really good ideas. Having to drag an entire stack of blocks out of a script to delete one block is a real pain. Renaming variables might not be necessary, but it would be nice. As for drop-down menus for show/hide, that might cause problems for people with older versions of Scratch, but I can't see any disadvantages otherwise.
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By the way, the Scratch Team has already planned about the "Show and Hide blocks for Lists".
Lightnin wrote:
Yep - this one seems important, and lots of Scratchers have asked for in the Suggestions forum! Definitely on the list for Scratch 2.0.
![]()
(Source: add blocks to show and hide lists)
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mathematics wrote:
By the way, the Scratch Team has already planned about the "Show and Hide blocks for Lists".
Lightnin wrote:
Yep - this one seems important, and lots of Scratchers have asked for in the Suggestions forum! Definitely on the list for Scratch 2.0.
![]()
(Source: add blocks to show and hide lists)
When will Scratch 2.0 come out?
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spongebobguy wrote:
mathematics wrote:
By the way, the Scratch Team has already planned about the "Show and Hide blocks for Lists".
Lightnin wrote:
Yep - this one seems important, and lots of Scratchers have asked for in the Suggestions forum! Definitely on the list for Scratch 2.0.
![]()
(Source: add blocks to show and hide lists)
When will Scratch 2.0 come out?
Sometime in 2011; the Scratch Team hasn't been much more specific than that. It's a major redesign (in a whole new programming language), so it might take a while.
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