Hi, Guyren,

The problem you encountered on that one machine almost certainly was due to that computer's "caps lock" key having been inadvertently pushed in. This resulted in all mouse and keyboard interactions being interpreted on that machine as if the SHIFT key were being held down.

When the shift key is held down while certain halo handles are clicked, you get "alternate" halo actions. For example, holding the shift key down while you click on the magenta halo handle will bring up a small color chooser rather than the huge graphical-properties sheet.

In the case of the turquoise-eye halo handle, a normal click brings up the normal etoy "Viewer", whereas a shift-click brings up a Smalltalk "Instance Browser" showing "Universal Tiles", which is what you saw on that computer. I think that probably we had *all* lost track of the fact that that feature, a leftover from a demo by a colleague years ago, was still in there. It has no relevance at all to current etoy users, and should be, and now will be, removed from the system.

Thank you!

Cheers,

-- Scott

On Nov 6, 2006, at 8:46 PM, Guyren Howe wrote:

Just did my first eToys group today. It went really well! After one hour, a dozen computers were covered with sprites moving in all kinds of ways, covered in turtle trails, making a huge cacophany. The students all did more than I expected in the time.

My puzzle is this: I got there an hour before the class, and went round all the computers, going to the Squeakland website, and running the installer on each of the computers. Identical stpes on 16 computers.

During the group, one of the students called me over. She'd been at the computer for five or ten minutes by this point. On this machine, when you click on an eToy, click on its eye/inspect halo button, rather than the normal eToy inspector, we got what seems to be some kind of smalltalk browser. I clicked around a bit, and I couldn't find anything in that window that would show the regular eToy inspector, nor any other way of bringing up the eToy inspector, nor what she might have done to cause this change in behavior.

Comments? (cause/fix/workaround)

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