Journal integration for Scratch

[Philipp Kocher]

Hi John

Sorry for the late response.

I think to increase the font size in the file dialog is a good idea. As
for the thumbnails and project notes, for us an easy way to open and
save the projects is more important than to see a thumbnail and project
notes (the filename and the date when the project was saved is enough
information for us).

If the examples and the own projects would be separated (e.g. a button
examples) would help as well. It is quite confusing for the students
that they can not save their projects in some folders (folder symbols of
own folders and example folders look the same, but no write permission
for the example folders). TurtleArt has such a solution.

Scratch is the favourite Activity at our school, even so it is quite
hard for the students to drag and drop the small command icons on the XO
with the jumping mouse cursor problem.

I am aware that these are all just XO problems and you have to maintain
other platforms as well. Thanks for your great support for Scratch on
the XO.

Thanks,
Philipp
Pepyride School
Cambodia

John Maloney wrote:
> Hi, Phillip.
> 
> Re: Do you plan a journal integration for scratch?
> 
> Probably not in the near future. There has been talk about making an API 
> for the Journal that looks more like a file system to application 
> programs. That might be the easiest way to integrate the Journal into 
> Scratch in the long run.
> 
> Sugar continues to evolve. Earlier versions still allowed access to the 
> file system in a way that made it fairly easy to port applications like 
> Scratch. More recently, with the Rainbow security system, it became much 
> more difficult to use the file system directly.
> 
> I support Scratch on many different platforms. The XO is an important 
> one due to the educational mission of OLPC. Still, my time is limited 
> and I can only spend so much of it on the XO version of Scratch. Thus, I 
> try to steer a middle path -- create a Scratch port for the XO without 
> changing too much of the Scratch source code. I am hoping that 
> eventually Sugar will make life easier for those porting applications 
> from file-based platforms by providing some sort of virtual file system 
> API. The Journal and the virtual file system could just be two views on 
> the same set of files.
> 
> Re:
>> At the moment it is not possible to delete scratch projects easily 
>> (just in terminal) and our students have difficulty to understand the 
>> file and folder structure in the dialog with the very small font.
> 
> Yes, I see the problem. Your solution sounds like it would work, but the 
> downside is that browsing for existing Scratch projects would be done 
> using the Journal, rather than Scratch's "open" dialog. That means the 
> user would not see the project thumbnail and project notes.
> 
> If project deletion is the only issue, my preference would be to add a 
> way to delete projects to the Scratch open and save dialogs. (Although 
> I'm not promising to do that immediately, since we're currently working 
> on the release of Scratch 1.4.)
> 
> Another solution (which could be more near-term) would be to increase 
> the font size in the file dialog. Do you think that would help?
> 
>     -- John
>