[etoys-dev] Favorite new features in Etoys 4

[Bert Freudenberg]

On 30.09.2009, at 00:57, Edward Cherlin wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 9:54 AM, Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de 
> > wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I think it would be good to collect and point out some of your  
>> favorite new
>> features that we should explicitly tell the others about to try.
>>
>> For example, one thing that should help quite a bit with e.g.  
>> documenting is
>> that you can copy-and-paste an object from Etoys into another  
>> application.
>> E.g., I just got the halo on a script, pressed Cmd-C, switched to  
>> Mail,
>> pressed Cmd-V, and got this:
>
> [graphic omitted] Excellent. Can you group objects and copy them all  
> at once?

It works for everything you can get a halo on. So if you put all in a  
Playfield or a book page etc. you can snapshot those.

>> So please tell us what you think is new and exciting!
>
> How does one find out what is in Etoys?

Excellent question. I have no idea how to do that systematically. It's  
like a medieval castle remodeled again and again into a baroque palace  
with a thousand hidden rooms. I'm using Squeak for 10+ years now and  
still find things I didn't know existed. It's that deep.

It's somewhat easier to find out what changed in this release compared  
to the last one year ago, though it's spread all over the place. And  
not really massaged into easily digestable form. The closest may be

http://svn.squeakland.org/installers/NEWS

though it skimps on the detail. More detailed is this

http://etoys.laptop.org/src/NEWS

It also goes further back, to 2006, when we started on the OLPC  
version. It's excerpted from the full changelogs here

http://etoys.laptop.org/src/

For stuff before 2006 I don't think we have detailed changelogs  
online, though those could (and probably should) be reconstructed.

For the big releases on Squeakland we try to do release notes that  
list the major improvements. This is last year's:

http://squeakland.org/download/releaseNotes.jsp

but I couldn't find the earlier ones. Would be good to have.

- Bert -