6.7.1 released

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You are PUMPING out new updates.
More than I could say for Scratch...
Please add official support for cloud variables in the next patch

another update???????????????

yes. major updates for scratch are, like every 6 years. major updates for :snap: are, like every year.

This will require loads of backend code, I hope @bh or @jens understands nodejs

Thank you. It's pretty common, with a new release, that users start pounding on it and discover bugs, and then we release a x.y.1 and maybe even x.y.2 soon after. This one was my fault (for the PIPE problem), sorry! (The one about not saving some lists correctly wasn't my fault. Maybe Nathan's? Has that problem been in the serializer from the beginning?) For x.y.0 versions we typically wait until there's something fairly big, like the ability to undelete sprites in 6.7.

That wouldn't be an easy change. We'd have to write cloud support as well as the user-visible changes in the editor. And we'd have to work out policies about what's allowed in cloud variables, both in terms of size (we pay for server space!) and in terms of content (we probably don't want to host chats that way). And it'd be one more thing for us to monitor; if, say, we said "okay, you can have cloud variables, but only with numbers," within an hour some wiseguy would implement text strings using Unicode values.

So, yeah, we understand why that'd be useful, but you're unlikely to see it in a minor-version-number release.

There's so much we want to improve in Snap!! We were just talking yesterday about improving support for debugging, another thing that really needs some design effort, not just coding. For example, I'd like to be able to right-click on a block, select "Who calls this?" from the menu, and get a list of blocks back. (We do have a feature to see which sprites use a block, although it just momentarily flashes the thumbnails in the Sprite Corral instead of reporting a list as I'd prefer. But I don't think we yet have any context menu options that report a value, as opposed to displaying things or writing things into files, etc. So there's no syntactic way to put a "Who calls this?" result into a command, such as saving it in a variable. This is a tiny piece of what I mean about having to design things before we implement them.)

When Jens invented BYOB, it was a proof-of-concept for custom blocks, to show the Scratch Team. He wasn't expecting anyone to actually use it. If we'd had a couple of years of design effort before opening up to users, as Scratch did, we probably wouldn't have had so many major version numbers since. So I'm a little uncomfortable about comparing Snap! with Scratch in this regard. Also, there's a downside to major changes, which is that they break curricula. Even something not so major, such as the new LENGTH OF with a dropdown for the function to apply to the list breaks a zillion pictures of scripts in the curricula that use Snap!. Experienced users, especially experienced kid users, take that kind of change in stride, but we've learned from sad experience that some teachers don't; they panic when something doesn't look exactly like the picture in the curriculum. (And, to be fair, once in a while we accidentally break some piece of curriculum in a more significant way.)

All of which is just to say that we know there's a lot we can still improve in Snap!, and we're doing our best, although we're all at least partly paid to do things other than improve Snap!. But often there are things less exciting than big new features that are less fun, but more urgent. Right now the big one is to get to where we can sign privacy contracts with school districts. One piece of this effort involves programming, mostly in the cloud server, but a lot of it is boring meetings with lawyers, which are a pain to schedule. (We are actually meeting with three different groups of people at Berkeley: there's a privacy office whose job is to know about FERPA and GDPR and COPPA; there's the campus General Counsel, the actual official lawyers; and there's the Business Contracts office that actually signs contracts. You don't need to know that--it's just to help you understand why I said "boring" earlier.)

I agree with @bh, because Minecraft does the same thing. It is not Snap that updates quickly, it is Scratch that updates slowly

We could just use socket.io, but what @bh should really should change is the snap paint editor

Please don't hijack threads for rants.

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