[Sugar-devel] [RELEASE] Etoys 4.1.2384

Bert Freudenberg bert at freudenbergs.de
Tue Aug 31 06:34:09 EDT 2010


On 31.08.2010, at 10:35, Simon Schampijer wrote:

> On 08/30/2010 11:50 AM, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>> 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
> 
> I guess you mean 
> http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/glucose/etoys/etoys-4.1.2384.tar.gz 
> ?

I do. I copied from my last announcement which had the same typo. *smackshead*

Hopefully I'll get it right in the next beta ;)

- Bert -




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