Dots bug

[anon45095554]

Guys, idk why, but my blocks now have 3 dots, it looks ugly. Anyone knows how can i fix that bug?

[cymplecy]

This is not a bug.
It's just the new look
Things change

[anon45095554]

who decided this change? @bh

[alessandrito123]

@luna.judah If the new look is ugly for you, just live with it, isn't an bad change to our Snap!, just the dots are for indicating if the selected MultiArgMorph checks its isStatic as false. I love that.

The isStatic property is only available for the SyntaxElementMorph morphs in blocks.js, this property just locks the input if checks it as true or no if is false, the MultiArgMorph is just one of the childs of ArgMorph and the ArgMorph is the unique child of the SyntaxElementMorph, that means that the SyntaxElementMorph is the grandparent of the MultiArgMorph, only the MultiArgMorph and the BooleanSlotMorph (its sibling) change their designs if are "static inputs" or no; if the isStatic property is true: the MultiArgMorph removes its 3 dots, and the BooleanSlotMorph changes its extent and its checking icons to the words "true" or "false"
but if else: "nothing happens", that's the explaining because I'm working on a Snap! mod.

[bh]

@anon45095554

who decided this change?

This is insulting. You seem to think that someone on the staff just decided to uglify Snap! for no reason. (I'm guessing that you don't yet know what those three dots are telling you. Perhaps your opinion will change when you find out?)

About the "who" part: as it happens, this was a very extensively discussed design change, and we considered something like eight or nine designs, including no change, before reaching a consensus. We even considered some user input, since an early design has been up in the dev version for a while.

[ego-lay_atman-bay]

That really just means, the 3 dots indicate that you can drop a reporter that reports a list (e.g. tge list block), onto the arrows in order to have an input list.

@bh

We even considered some user input, since an early design has been up in the dev version for a while.

When I first saw the first design (the list icon), I actually thought that it was a really good decision. It honestly looked nice, and would even show new users that they can drop a list into the variadic input. I personally think the 3 dots looks nicer though.

[bh]

@ego-lay_atman-bay

That really just means, the 3 dots indicate that you can drop a reporter that reports a list (e.g. t[h]e list block), onto the arrows in order to have an input list.

The backstory of this change is that Jens discovered in a series of conversations that even a bunch of well known Snap! experts didn't know about the input list feature, which means that the red halo over the arrowheads wasn't sufficiently "discoverable": something that users could figure out themselves. So the goal was to make it more obvious that you could drop a list there.

But I was unhappy with the list icon because this:

doesn't look like an INPUT LIST; it looks like the monadic form of a variadic input, as if clicking the right arrow would give you

This was particularly an issue because clicking the left arrowhead in the dyadic form of the block goes directly to the niladic form; there is no monadic form provided. So all the more reason that the niladic form with a list input icon looks like a monadic form. (Don't ask why; it's a detailed story about the implementation.)

Also, I really liked seeing
    
as a discoverable way for users to determine the identity element of naturally dyadic functions.

So, we all started proposing alternative notations that could make everyone happy. One early proposal from Jens was to use a list icon, but with just a black outline over the block's color, so that it would be visually clear that that icon was part of the variadic-arity control (with the arrowheads) rather than a separate (sub-)input slot. But that made the whole thing kind of fat and overpowering, so Jadga proposed the vertical-ellipsis symbol, which also means a list slot, in the context of the Block Editor prototype type hint for a list input. And that's where we ended up. (I'm leaving out a few intermediate steps in the discussion.)

I'm not sure this was anyone's first choice, but it ended up more or less everyone's second choice, so that's where we ended up.

[anon45095554]

ayo hold on, i didnt know it indicates something, i just thought its a bug. sorry

[anon45095554]

well, now i actually think its useful, i overreacted probably because of i used to old's look

[bh]

Okay.