[Sugar-devel] [RELEASE] Etoys 4.1.2384

[Bert Freudenberg]

This is the first beta release of Etoys 4.1.

The biggest change is that stopping the Etoys activity will no longer save to the Journal. To save, you will have to press the keep button. The octagonal stop button is replaced by a circular exit button to indicate the new behavior. It puts up a warning before actually quitting.

This was a tough decision to make. It violates the Sugar policy that users should not have to worry about saving. Etoys generally tries to follow Sugar conventions as close as reasonable. It saved automatically ever since we implemented Journal support in 2007.

However, using an Etoys project is the same as modifying it. In Etoys, "authoring is always on", so much so that there is no distinction between "authoring" and "using" (or as developers would say, "development" and "runtime"). In particular, Etoys cannot decide if changes the user did are meant to be made permanent. 

What happened is that simply viewing a project (e.g., downloaded from the Squeakland Showcase, or even the built-in examples) saved it in a state the author did not intend. Without versioning, the author's version is lost for good. Basically you could only ever see the project once, because quitting and restarting would preserve its "dirty" state. Even if the Journal supported versioning by now (which we had hoped for to alleviate the problem), auto-resuming the latest saved version would pretty much still result in the same bad user experience.

The only solution we can think of is leave it to the user to explicitly save the project, as on the other platforms Etoys supports. Kudos to the Squeakland education team who got XOs through the OLPC contributors program, and prompted us to finally make this change we had been pondering for years. Feedback appreciated.

For more changes, see the log below.

== Sources ==

http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/glucose/etoys/etoys-4.0.2384.tar.gz

== Changes since 4.1.2382 (alpha 2) ==

* no save on stop under Sugar, must use keep button (enable sugarAutoSave to revert to old behavior)
* easier to make flap (see supplies)
* GSoC addition: scriptable speech bubbles
* translatability of Text object must be enabled explicitly
* minor fixes
* updated translations from Pootle
* added languages zh_CN, ca, sk, pap, pl, km, en_GB, ar_SY
* revised Italian, Portuguese, and German QuickGuides

== Changes since 4.1.2381 (alpha 1) ==

* fix DBus service methods
* fix NavBar not showing Sugar buttons
* fix 'length' and 'width' being read-only
* flip commands renamed to 'flip left right' and 'flip up down'
* fix QuickGuides showing up twice

== Changes since 4.0 (previous stable) ==

* switched to etoys.squeak.org/svn repo
* translations broken up in smaller files
* activity version will not track etoys version anymore
* QuickGuides translated to Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian, and (some) French
* added DrGeo for exploring geometry
* sketches support flipping
* geometry tiles for the world
* timer tile (world and other playfields)
* can store preferences
* plus bug fixes

- Bert - (for the Etoys team)