Every time I save a brand new project, I find it hard to share it. Eighter I need to go back to My projects or hit Save as … then search for my project in the list and press Share. I have 195 projects. It is hard to scroll that much. Same happens when I create a copy of an existing project trough Save as. In the first case the Open is Community site option is missing, in the second case it points to the old project. So when you hit the browser’s refresh you loose the project.
It seems that having a valid url after save/save as would solve my issue and at the same time bring consistency.
I wrote few lines of code to fix this and this is how it works.
I think the current URL policy is broken. (It’s one of the things I keep bringing up at staff meetings.) You should get a predictable URL only if/when you publish your projects. Projects that are private or shared should have randomly generated URLs, just like Google Docs.
As for the search bar, for some reason I seem to have a million projects named math+C2 numberline project* and if we used the filesystem as the database (which, unlike the other issue, they keep explaining to me why it’s a bad idea, but not so I understand; it seems to me that a database is just a filesystem with an index) then I could use the whole range of shell commands, including find for a pretty much arbitrary query, but more to the point rm!
(Why yes, I did just say that unpublished projects should have random URLs, but through the miracle of Unix (or any decent operating system), each file can have two names with different lookup permissions!)
I like that I can change my Snap bookmark to be any unshared project of my choice as my default project. With a randomly generated URL, would the URL show up right away like in Scratch? If it would that’d be fine, but otherwise it would be a hassle trying to figure out what the URL is.
I honestly hate how scratch does it. When you go into the editor, it creates and saves a new project. This means that you can build up a ton of empty test projects really quickly. I would much rather have it generate the url when you save or open a project (the url would be unique to a project, and it would stay the same between saves).
I don’t see any search bar in the editor. I want to share my project in edito mode right away and send a link to a friend. I don’t want to share the community project page.
I think they’re talking about the URL bar above the whole Snap! window.
The fact that you can’t share an unsaved project isn’t an arbitrary UI decision; if the project isn’t saved, we don’t have it to respond to a URL. Scratch, like Google Docs, wants to eliminate the entire concept of saving; they want users to think there is only one document, and it’s automatically the same everywhere, just as, for example, when you change your password on a web page, if you use a password manager the change automatically appears in any other browser or other computer you might use. It’s a simple idea, arguably the best choice for Scratch’s target eight year old nonprogrammer audience. (If a project does have nontrivial code, I would argue that the cognitive load avoided by not saving comes back to haunt you in the form of reversion to a version from before you introduced some bug.)
But if something is the right choice for Scratch, that doesn’t automatically make it the best choice for Snap!. Our target audience of teenage apprentice computer scientists can handle the concept of saving a file, and having a small skew between the local version and the last saved version. In this way of thinking, saving a file is like giving it a new sub-sub-minor version number.
And you can have the best of both worlds by autosaving to a file separate from the official saved file. Since it’s best, naturally it’s how Emacs does things. :~) There’s a sort of implicit warranty that the official file is in an internally consistent state, whereas while you’re in the process of making a change to the code there’s no such guarantee about the current state, even if that state has been autosaved.
Yeah, I hate it too - every time I want to test something I have to go back into My Stuff and delete the project afterwards. When I wrote my previous post, I didn’t really think about that part, but of course what you suggest is how it should work!
Unless you have a ton of unnamed or unorganized project names, you should be able to find it (the project you want to find) easily. If everything is not named or organized, that’s your fault, not snaps. They organize everything in alphabetical order as well, so all of your “unnamed” saves will be easy to find.
You can share and publish a project from your projects page:
This does, however, seem like a decent idea for efficiency.
If you’re experienced enough to write code and implement it into snap*!* then you should have no problem just using the code you wrote to share/publish as a mod or add on to solve your terribly difficult and overwhelming problem.
