Hi gang, I held another Squeak/eToys workshop a couple weekends back in my hometown's children's museum (kidscommons.org) and just wanted to provide some more user feedback (where the users were 4-6 graders). Without a doubt, the most common problem/frustration they had was inserting a new tile into (at the end of) a script. For whatever reason, performing this action was much more problematic than in other workshops I've conducted - although it often shows up to some degree in every workshop. The students felt compelled to exactly line up the new tile with the last tile in the script and would inevitably "drop it" just outside the script, causing it to auto-create a new script. I wonder, is it possible to modify the insert-tile-into-script logic/code to allow for a delta-offset along both the left-hand and bottom boundaries of a script? If so, I could see this UI frustration essentially disappearing. It would seem to be the logical thing to do since, if a user was trying to create a new script, they would keep it a safe distance from any other script when dropping it into the world.
Another frustration involved the creation of a frame-based animation and the auto-centering of the "rotation center" crosshairs. An example which many are probably already familiar with is BJ's flower pot with the growing flowers. For this type of project, it would be extremely useful to provide a menu item which locks the rotation center. This would allow for a smooth animation, rather than having to manually re-center the crosshairs on each frame. (This is also somewhat related to a question I posted a few weeks back about programmatically setting the location of the rotation center, to which Scott replied that it was not possible).
Fwiw, Randy
At 2:33 PM -0500 1/23/06, Randy Heiland wrote:
... (This is also somewhat related to a question I posted a few weeks back about programmatically setting the location of the rotation center, to which Scott replied that it was not possible).
Just to clarify, my reply was that it (i.e. programmatically setting an object's rotation center) could not done with tiles alone, but that it was "easily accomplished" if the user were willing to resort to using a single line of *textual* script...
At 3:24 PM -0800 12/6/05, Scott Wallace wrote:
However, programmatically setting an object's rotation center is easily accomplished via a *textual* script. Send #rotationCenter: to the player's costume's renderedMorph.
Cheers,
-- Scott
Hi, Randy,
It's a bug, certainly not an intended feature, that a painting's old rotation center was getting forgotten when you repainted it.
An update fixing this is currently going through internal field-test and soon to go public.
Thank you, as ever!
Cheers,
-- Scott
At 2:33 PM -0500 1/23/06, Randy Heiland wrote:
Another frustration involved the creation of a frame-based animation and the auto-centering of the "rotation center" crosshairs. An example which many are probably already familiar with is BJ's flower pot with the growing flowers. For this type of project, it would be extremely useful to provide a menu item which locks the rotation center. This would allow for a smooth animation, rather than having to manually re-center the crosshairs on each frame....
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