Etoys 4 and the new Showcase

Squeakland is proud to announce the release of Etoys 4, which you can now download from our website. Special thanks to the Squeakland software team, particularly Bert Freudenberg, Yoshiki Ohshima, and Scott Wallace for their tremendous efforts in the last month. Your hard work really shows!

Below you'll find some thoughts by Scott Wallace, along with the Etoys 4 release notes which detail the changes you'll find. Of special interest is the new Squeakland Showcase. Everyone can now share their projects directly from Etoys to our website, where the Etoys community can then benefit from the many surprising and useful Etoys examples that are available. Please explore the showcase and share your projects with us. We want to hear from you!

Also, if you haven't signed our Squeakers list, consider adding your name. As I write this, more than 175 people from 35 countries have signed, which really shows the enthusiasm and reach of Etoys throughout the world.

Etoys 4 has three major new changes and many smaller improvements. Representing a year's worth of work, Etoys 4 is the last release to include the direct participation Viewpoints Research, as their focus has always been to create prototypes and spin them out into new organizations. Viewpoints will now pass the reigns over to the newly formed Squeakland Foundation, whose mission is to "build community and encourage deep learning worldwide by promoting, supporting, and improving Squeak Etoys and related educational media."

Please join us!

Showcase

The biggest change to Etoys and the Squeakland website is our new project showcase. You may now share projects directly from Etoys to the Squeakland website. Simply click the Save button, give project details, and choose "My Squeakland" as the save location. To get a showcase account, visit http://squeakland.org/action/signup.

You can then access your project from the Squeakland website or directly within Etoys itself, using the Load button. This allows you to use the website as a central place to store your Etoys projects, whether you wish to make them public or not. When you first upload a project, it's marked private, which means only you or your friends may see it. (Friends functionality will be added later this year.) You can then choose to make your project public by clicking "make public" on the project page. After being reviewed by other users for inappropriate content, your project will then become visible to everyone. Please help us show off the best Etoys projects!

Etoys-To-Go

The next big change is called "Etoys-To-Go", which is a new way to install and use Etoys. Simply choose Etoys-To-Go from the download page instead of Windows, Mac, or Linux. You'll then have a portable Etoys that works on any computer that can be easily copied from machine to machine, without the added installation step. Even better, you can run Etoys-To-go directly from a USB flash drive, which means you can use Etoys on any computer without getting permission from system administrators. Your project files are saved back to the USB stick, so you can quickly save and run on your way to school. Unfortunately, Etoys-To-Go does not include our browser plugin, so if you want to browse projects on the web, you'll still need to download and install the usual Windows, Mac, or Linux version. Project files can be easily exchanged between the Etoys-To-Go, Mac, Windows, and Linux versions.

License Clean

Etoys 4 is now "license clean", which means it conforms to the requirements of free and open source systems, such as the various Linux distributions. In 1996, Apple released Squeak under their own license. In 2006, Apple relicensed the Squeak core under the Apache 2.0 license, thanks to Steve Jobs, Alan Kay, and the lawyers involved. Soon after, Viewpoints Research collected written relicensing agreements from several hundred contributors under the MIT license, thanks to Kim Rose and the Squeak community volunteers. Finally, all code in Etoys not explicitly covered by a relicensing agreement was removed, rewritten, or reverted to an earlier version, thanks primarily to the efforts of Yoshiki Ohshima. The result of this hard work is that Squeak Etoys is now completely free and open source, which means it can be used and modified by anyone in the world for whatever purpose they imagine.

Improvements

• The project-info box fields were updated to match the new Squeakland showcase.
  
• The load box lets you browse not only local files, but projects in the Squeakland showcase as well.
  
• The local document directory is automatically pre-selected when saving a project.
  
• Projects are now created at a 1200x900 pixel resolution by default, and scaled to the actual Etoys window size. This ensures easier sharing of projects between computers of different screen resolution.
  
• The former display-mode button in the toolbar now toggles full-screen mode. To access the scaling options menu, hold down the button.
  
• On the right of the toolbar, there is a new button that governs toolbar visibility.
  
• To minimize the chance of obscuring essential content when opening older projects, the toolbar will now appear in its collapsed form, at the top-right corner of the screen.
  
• New icons were chosen for Quit, Load, and Save buttons. Under Sugar, the Stop, Import, and Keep icons are used instead.
  
• The "undo" button was removed to make room in the toolbar, as it did not work reliably anyway.
  
• We renamed the startup screen to "Home".
  
• The home screen is now always accessible via project navigation buttons.
  
• We now show the full set of choices in the authoring-tools menu to all users whether eToyFriendly is turned on or not.
  
• A book's navigation bar is now protected from being ripped out accidentally.
  
• Objects can now be copied into and out of Etoys using the system clipboard. When the halo is visible, press Ctrl-C to copy (Cmd-C on Mac).
  
• The world now receives all keystrokes for better scripting of keyboard-controlled projects.
  
• The less widely-used items of the "geometry" category have been moved out to a new category called "more geometry".
  
• Opening a new category pane now closes other categories if there isn't enough vertical space on the screen.
  
• The "bearing to" and "distance to" tiles now respect an object's reference position (center of rotation).
  
• The grab-patch tool can now be dragged in any direction, not just top-left to bottom-right.
  
• Lasso and grab-patch tools were moved back to Supplies flap.
  
• Wording improvements were made in several menus and help balloons.
  
• On Linux, sound compatibility has been improved.
  
• The separate .gif file is no longer generated.
  
• Saving a project now includes a "thumbnail.png" inside the project. You can use a zip tool to extract the thumbnail if needed.
  
• The Mac Finder now shows a thumbnail for new project files.
  
• Translations and Quick Quides now work in the web browser plugin.
  
• Etoys now ships the ScratchPlugin (although we only use the "open URL in web browser" primitive so far). Thanks to Mitchel Resnick and John Maloney and the other Lifelong Kindergardeners.

Known Bugs

• Uploading a project from Etoys to Squeakland does not work if you are behind a proxy. Please use a web browser to upload projects in this case.
  
• On Snow Leopard, the web browser plugin works unreliable in Safari. We recommend using Firefox until we fix this problem.
  
• If you encounter issues in the plugin, try clicking the full-screen button in the toolbar. This can fix animation sluggishness, repainting problems, and wrong key/button mappings.