We'd all like it, but the cloud is actually being funded out of jens's pocket, bekeley isn't actually funding snap.
Snap uses the xml format because, well, that's just how the save files are formatted. .sb files are the format scratch uses, which is incompatible with snap. Even if they changed the format to same as scratch, it would still not work seeing as how there are many many things that won't work in scratch.
To share a project on itch.io, you can just easily copy the embed code of your project (go to your project on the community site then click Embed. Copy the html code, and paste it into a new file. Save that as an html file, then just upload that to itch.io.
To convert a project to exe, you'd have to use Snapp! although, it hasn't been updated to snap 7.0 yet, so you can't (yet).
All that gibberish is actually compressed files (several files as one file).
That's a ZIP file with a file format of SB3. If you save the .sb3 file as a zip instead (project.sb3 --> project.zip) and uncompress the file, you can visit the project.json file and edit the code. It looks something like this:
{"targets":[{"isStage":true,"name":"Stage","variables":{"`jEk@4|i[#Fk?(8x)AV.-my variable":["my variable",0]},"lists":{},"broadcasts":{},"blocks":{},"comments":{},"currentCostume":0,"costumes":[{"assetId":"c346d44e9bad5c8ea513ec237b09190c","name":"backdrop1","bitmapResolution":1,"md5ext":"c346d44e9bad5c8ea513ec237b09190c.svg","dataFormat":"svg","rotationCenterX":289.5,"rotationCenterY":188}],"sounds":[{"assetId":"83a9787d4cb6f3b7632b4ddfebf74367","name":"pop","dataFormat":"wav","format":"","rate":48000,"sampleCount":1123,"md5ext":"83a9787d4cb6f3b7632b4ddfebf74367.wav"}],"volume":100,"layerOrder":0,"tempo":60,"videoTransparency":50,"videoState":"on","textToSpeechLanguage":null},{"isStage":false,"name":"Sprite1","variables":{},"lists":{},"broadcasts":{},"blocks":{},"comments":{},"currentCostume":0,"costumes":[{"assetId":"0809704f4623ae73569c5894e396aab3","name":"Sladescar","bitmapResolution":1,"md5ext":"0809704f4623ae73569c5894e396aab3.svg","dataFormat":"svg","rotationCenterX":57.408375457701965,"rotationCenterY":82.11674584180463}],"sounds":[{"assetId":"2371165ee49767ff907cc9e845ad7b4a","name":"Meow","dataFormat":"wav","format":"","rate":48000,"sampleCount":76681,"md5ext":"2371165ee49767ff907cc9e845ad7b4a.wav"},{"assetId":"a3a88cadb8181dc391e766b4c47ce352","name":"discord_remix","dataFormat":"wav","format":"","rate":48000,"sampleCount":1089670,"md5ext":"a3a88cadb8181dc391e766b4c47ce352.wav"},{"assetId":"8b1892c2eafcc07f25e3f127c2cd4378","name":"MarioKart Wii Main Menu","dataFormat":"wav","format":"","rate":48000,"sampleCount":7106560,"md5ext":"8b1892c2eafcc07f25e3f127c2cd4378.wav"},{"assetId":"5f26d632b3d180ddaf80abfc2d0408b2","name":"New Years Day","dataFormat":"wav","format":"","rate":48000,"sampleCount":2428766,"md5ext":"5f26d632b3d180ddaf80abfc2d0408b2.wav"}],"volume":100,"layerOrder":1,"visible":true,"x":0,"y":0,"size":100,"direction":90,"draggable":false,"rotationStyle":"all around"}],"monitors":[],"extensions":[],"meta":{"semver":"3.0.0","vm":"0.2.0-prerelease.20220315115545","agent":"Mozilla/5.0 (X11; CrOS x86_64 14543.0.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/101.0.4918.0 Safari/537.36"}}
Jens pays for all the server costs and maintenance. Who's paying him? Barely anyone does! Only the university (Correct me if I'm wrong) and the tickets people buy for events like Snap!Con are the sources of money he gets.
So maybe be grateful (If you aren't already)?
So what about it? No one cares about it.
Also @bh said that we should avoid conversations that compare Snap! with Scratch. You should probably know that by now. WE ARE NOT A POLITICAL COMMUNITY AND WE AREN'T TOXIC EITHER. Trust me, we've had a LONG history of those conversations and man did they not end well.
I'm pretty sure berkeley doesn't, he pays for it out of his pocket, so he isn't being payed to work on snap. I do think that snapcon is one of the ways he gets money. Another way is probably by donations, although, I'm not sure if he is getting donations.
No, Jens is actually employed by SAP to work on Snap!, along with Jadga and Bernat. But all of them have to do things other than work directly on Snap!, such as making those MOOCs that SAP hosts. So he's not living in poverty. But he is paying the cloud hosting costs out of pocket. We're trying to fix that.
Nobody pockets Snap!Con money. It helps pay expenses, but there really isn't that much of it.
As for Berkeley, although they have a huge budget, none of it is going to Snap!. They pay Michael, but to teach Berkeley students, not to work on Snap!. Basically their budget is zero-sum; nothing can come out unless something goes in to match it. The development of BJC, done at Berkeley and later also at Education Development Center, was paid for by grants from the National Science Foundation.
Oh, and Joan has a non-Snap!-related day job, and I'm retired and have a pension from Berkeley.
I'm supposed to be looking for private rich foundations to support Snap!. But I suck at fundraising. I'm much better at chatting with teenagers. ;~)
Ok, thanks for clearing that up. I guess I'll have to remember this post.
Lol, that is so true (btw, I'm a teenager). For a very long time, I didn't know you were retired. I thought you were middle-aged, until I saw you in a snapcon video.
