[Sugar-devel] [RELEASE] Etoys 4.1.2384

[Gary Martin]

Hi Vert,

On 30 Aug 2010, at 10:50, 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.

:-(( but I'm sure this was a really tough decision to make.

Do you have a screen shot of the new UI and warning dialogue that I can easily take a look at?

My first gut reaction (not having seen it yet) is that the Keep button is a real problem generally (and causes confusion and misunderstanding in Sugar). Habitually training kids to click that icon each time before exiting will, for all other activities, generate many confusing duplicate Journal entries over time and make matters even worse.

For the Etoys case, as a workaround for not knowing your clean/dirty state, I think having the regular Stop UI button that when clicked _always_ displayed some sort of "Do you want to Keep the changes to this project in the Journal?" Keep/Don't Keep dialogue. That way kids can just keep clicking the Stop button without worry in all activities, and it's just that the Etoys pop-us up and extra dialogue when they do click Stop there.

Apologies if this is already what your new "warning before actually quitting" dialogue does :)

Regards,
--Gary

> 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)
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Sugar-devel mailing list
> Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel