Hello. I'm trying Scratch for the first time, and I'm finding it almost impossible to use.
The problem is a huge lag whenever I either drag a control block or try to draw something in the sprite editor -- as soon as I click the mouse button to begin a drag, the mouse pointer turns from white to black, and the application seems to halt cold (lock up) for several seconds, and I have to stop and wait for the application to unfreeze itself before I can do anything or even see where I actually dragged and dropped what I just tried to move.
I don't have a really complicated project with loads of sprites; this is happening on a brand new project with no sprites except the cat. I get this lag even when I'm just dragging the "when green flag clicked" block needed to run the project.
My stats:
-- I'm using Scratch 1.3 (release as of 11-Sep-08).
-- My machine is an iMac (4 GB RAM, 3.06 GHz processor, over 600 GB hard disk space free, NVIDIA 512 MB video card) running OS X Leopard 10.5.5. So I'm fairly sure that my problem is not due to my machine being underpowered. :-)
-- I really don't have very many other applications open right now. I have my file manager (Path Finder), a few web applications, and a notebook application, but nothing like Photoshop or Final Cut Pro or any other really heavyweight application that might hog system resources.
Has anyone else had this problem on the Mac? And what can I do about it?
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I'm experiencing the same problems with my eMacs (700MHz, 640MB RAM). I see the lag mostly in the "drawing" mode. The mouse jumps rather than moving smoothly, which is really a pain for the kids. Any help would be appreciated.
Ben Feingold
Tech Coordinator
Dearborn Academy
bfeingold@sfcinc.org
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Aitch,
I'm on a fairly similar setup at home, without any problems, so yours should be resolvable somehow. I'm assuming you've applied all the latest software updates, in particular the ones to the Java runtime? Also, try version 1.3.1 of Scratch, which was just released a couple days ago.
Dearborn: I've got a lab full of similar eMacs (running 10.4.11 and 1.3.1), and they all have the slightly laggy painting mode. It's annoying, but usable... not sure if there's a fix.
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I'm using an imac as well and no other program on it is having the problems that Scratch is having. I downloaded Scratch 1.3.1 and my Java is up to date but it is still horribly slow, and I really mean horrendously slow.
I have windows on my imac as well and Scratch is running just fine on the windows side of my machine - so it is specifically happening on my mac side.
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