Etoys 5 Release Notes

by Rita Freudenberg

Originally posted on the Squeakland website. Full release notes available from Squeakland

Thanks to the hard work of many contributors, we are proud to announce the new Etoys 5.0 release, which you can now download from our website!

New features

• a “single-step” feature in the scriptor number lines
• a scriptable calendar
• a scriptable “sector” object, allowing you to create slices of a pie of any angle
• “scratch connect”, providing a way to connect Etoys and Scratch
• a web-camera player that lets you directly access a webcam
• a “key press” object, which reports whether, and for how long, a specific key is pressed
• “attached” watchers, which always appear near the object they watch
• a “graph paper” tool to make graph-paper-like backgrounds
• new languages: Armenian, Dansk, Papiamentu, Polish

To find more details about these features, see the "How to use the new features" section in the full release notes.

Miscellaneous changes

• When adding a new variable, a dialog now appears inviting you to provide both a name and a type for the variable (and the number of decimal places to show as well, if the type is Number,) all at the same time. If you subsequently wish to change the name, the type, or the number of decimal places, choose the “modify” item In the menu beside the variable in the viewer, which replaces the items “change value type”, “rename”, and “decimal places...’.
• The “Press me” button has been removed from the supplies flap, because it’s not easy to grasp how to use it (but it is still available in the object catalog.) In its place in the Supplies flap will now be found a “Polygon.”
• The order of the items in the “pen use” category has been changed to make the most commonly-needed items easier to find.
• There is now an "Open script" halo handle on ScriptActivationButtons, offering a faster way to see the script that will be fired when the button is pressed.
• Added also is a “Button to show/hide this script” menu item in the Scriptor, which gives the user a button which, when pressed, will make that Scriptor appear on the screen, or, if already there, will remove it. Once you get such a button, you can use items in its halo menu to adjust the wording and other aspects of the appearance of the button.
• The treatment of the “forward direction” when the “look like” tile is used has been changed; the forward-direction of the “object being looked like” is no longer being adopted by the object doing the look-like. This change may make some projects created in earlier versions of Etoys behave differently if they use the “look like” tile.

Bug Fixes

• Scripts set to run on "opening" do now work for world, book, or the first page of a book.
• The display of animated GIFs is improved, and it is now possible to play and stop the animation and to change the “opaque” setting using tiles found in the viewer. (However, note that the GIF reader does not set “opaque” correctly so it's pure chance if playback looks right.)
• In Spanish, the viewer now shows the “basic” category first, as in other languages.
• And many more, see full list here: http://etoys.squeak.org/svn/trunk/Etoys/NEWS

Known problems

• Fonts for a few languages are missing in the Macintosh version. These require Pango, which is only available for Linux. If you choose “Chinese” you are asked to install additional fonts. Click “load font” to get the font which is provided by Etoys. But before you can change back from Chinese to another font, you need to quit Etoys and restart.
• The Web Browser Plugin works unreliably in Safari. We recommend using Firefox or Google Chrome in the meantime. In Firefox you need to switch to 32-bit-mode.
• If you encounter issues in the Web Browser Plugin, try clicking the Full Screen button in the Etoys tool bar. This can fix animation sluggishness, as well as wrong key or button mappings.

Compatibility Note

Projects created in version 4 of Etoys (Late 2009 to March 2012) should load without difficulty into Etoys 5. But some projects created in the new version will not be usable in older versions. If you try to load a project created using Etoys 5 into an earlier version of Etoys, a warning message will be presented about possible incompatibilities.

Contributors to Etoys 5

• Code:
  
  • Karl Ramberg,
  • Ricardo Moran,
  • Bert Freudenberg,
  • Scott Wallace,
  • Korakurider,
  • Koji Yokokawa
• Content:
  
  • Kathleen Harness,
  • Stephen Thomas,
  • Randall Caton,
  • Avigail Snir,
  • Rita Freudenberg,
  • Bert Freudenberg,
  • Scott Wallace,
  • Stephen Trofinoff
• Translations:
  
  • Korakurider,
  • Esther Mietzsch,
  • Markus Schlager,
  • Danishka Navin,
  • Cris Anderson,
  • Aputsiaq Niels Janussen,
  • and other members of the Sugar Labs / OLPC / Etoys Localization Community
• Bug Reports / Testing:
  
  • Cherry Withers,
  • Stephen Thomas,
  • Kathleen Harness,
  • Xin Wang,
  • Chris Leonard,
  • Alexandro Colorado,
  • Randall Caton,
  • Aputsiaq Niels Janussen,
  • Markus Schlager,
  • Ricardo Moran,
  • Karl Ramberg,
  • Bert Freudenberg,
  • Scott Wallace,
  • Rita Freudenberg,
  • Robert Hawley
• Hosting/Support:
  
  • Tim Falconer and Jon Kern of Immuexa,
  • Ken Causey of squeak.org,
  • ESUG for supporting the Google Summer of Code project

(More detailed notes are available at http://squeakland.org/download/releaseNotes.jsp)