Scratch

One of the morphs hidden in the coding of the current versions of Scratch is a movie player. This allows you to insert MPEG and JPEG movie files and play them IN SCRATCH. This would be very handy for Scratchers, because normally to make a "movie" in Scratch, you need to rip out every single frame by hand and them make them different costumes. (A perfect example of this is in my project Om Nom Nom, in which I had to rip 48 frames out of an animated GIF and convert them to a compatible file type. All by hand.) Also, it would be a big helping hand if the range of file types the player would accept would be broadened, as having only two options leads to a lot of converting. It could have a system similar to YouTube, where you upload a video file, and it converts to a Flash file automatically.


There are two big problems I see with this:

1. The morphs are internal to the Squeak language, and would have to be either converted or recreated.

2. In the current version, the morph doesn't work in Presentation mode. We'd have to find a way to make it work in 2.0.

Since this seems like a big thing, it could probably wait until 2.1 or something like that. Actually, converting all of the morphs for official use would be nice, but I recommend at least doing this and possibly the Tetris morph (because we all love our Tetris).


Discuss.