Scratch on Linux

Monday, November 02, 2009

For the past few months we have been working on improving the Ubuntu package of Scratch 1.4.1. We recently decided to release it using our own Personal Package Archive (PPA) on Launchpad so that people can simply add it to their sources and install it via Synaptic (as most other Ubuntu applications). The package is also available for download from our Linux documentation page.

We have tested this package on Ubuntu 9.04 and the recently released 9.10. Most features work just like they do on Windows and Mac OS, even the webcam and the PicoBoard!

There are still some issues that we hope to get ironed out in the future. Of course, if you are an experienced Linux hacker and would like to help us in this effort or in packaging for other distros please contact us at linux@scratch.mit.edu!

Many thanks to Amos Blanton, Derek O'Connell and John Maloney for all their work.

Consider donating to Scratch

Sunday, September 20, 2009

We are pleased to provide Scratch free of charge. If you enjoy using Scratch, please consider making a donation to support Scratch. Donations of any size are appreciated.

Your donation goes into our ScratchLabs fund, used to support future development of Scratch software and the Scratch website. On the donation form, just fill in the amount of your donation and select "New gift" in the pull-down menu for the gift type.

Thanks for supporting Scratch!

Scratch 1.4 is now available!

Thursday, July 02, 2009

We are happy to announce the release of Scratch 1.4 ! With this new version, you can:
* ask users to input text from the keyboard (with new "ask" and "answer" blocks)
* take photos directly from built-in or USB webcams
* run Scratch on smaller screens, such as on netbook computers
* control robotics with LEGO WeDo

Thanks to everyone who provided suggestions for Scratch 1.4. We really appreciate all of your help.

To learn more about Scratch 1.4, check the Release Notes.

Download Scratch 1.4 and try it out!

Recent changes to our website

Sunday, May 31, 2009

Based on some feedback and our own internal discussions, we have released some changes to our website that include:

1. New sections on the front page. "My Friends' Latest Projects", Surprise Projects from the Design Studio, "Projects curated by". We have not picked a curator yet, but once we do, her or his 3 latest favorite projects will be displayed on the front page.
2. Friend's projects on My Stuff page. This can be a nice way to give more meaning to "friendships". In part, inspired by Twitter followers. This picks each one of your friends latest 3 projects and displays them in different pages. This may put some stress on our servers, so we it is possible that we scale it down to only 1 or 2 pages.
   
3. Linking directly to comments. When receiving comments, you will be able to click on a link to go directly to a page where you can read it. No need to spend time trying to find the comment that could be buried under a hidden reply. This should also help display the page a bit faster as it doesn't have show anything other than the comment. Hopefully this helps our servers too.
   
4. One project per person on the front page. Now, even if a project is really popular it will only get one spot now on the front page. We think this gives everyone a better chance to get more visibility and feedback on their hard work.
5. Newest projects only for Scratch members. We are now showing the Newest projects section of the front page only after people are logged in. Since we allow only members of our community to flag projects, we think that non-members should not be presented with this category to reduce the chances of showing projects that do not represent the values of our community.
6. Easier translations. We now have a web-based translation mechanism that will make it easier for people to help translate our website. We welcome help translating!

UPDATE

Due to performance issues we had to disable "My Friends' Latest Projects" until we find a way to make it less intensive on our database server.

Scratch Curator

Friday, May 29, 2009

Lots of members of the Scratch community have expressed a desire to
choose which projects get shown on the Scratch Homepage. So we've
created a new role called curator. While serving as curator, a
Scratcher's most recent favorite projects will be displayed on the
Scratch homepage for everyone to see. It's a great way for community
members to show the diverse talents and interests in the Scratch
Community.

There's more info about becoming a curator on the Scratch Homepage here:
http://info.scratch.mit.edu/Become_a_Scratch_Curator

Recent traffic spike

Saturday, March 14, 2009

Two recent articles, one in Wired and another one in The Register have brought a lot of traffic to our website. This is great as we love to see more people learn about Scratch!

The bad news is that this traffic spikes are difficult to handle. To put it in perspective, two years ago when Scratch was officially unveiled, we got so much traffic from articles on the BBC, Slashdot and Digg that our website went down for a few hours. We have made a lot of performance tunning since then, however, last week's spike combined with the regular high traffic from a normal day slowed down our website significantly. The numbers from Google Analytics and Quantcast show these spikes:

The issue of scaling is something that has been occupying us for a while. We have considered scalable solutions like AWS, unfortunately, the costs of those services for a non-profit project like Scratch are well beyond our budget. We are currently hosting our website at the MIT Media Lab and while this is basically free, it does comes with a lot of challenges for scalability. We hope that as Scratch gains visibility it might also attract the attention from organizations and individuals that would be willing to support our scalability efforts.

In the meanwhile, we will continue working on improving our site using free technologies, such as memcached, that would allow us to make the best use posisible from the infrastructure we have.

Scratch Day

Sunday, March 01, 2009

Last year we had a great Scratch@MIT conference. This year, we're doing something different: a worldwide network of events. There are already more than 20 events registered and number keeps growing. The idea is to get Scratchers together to share projects and experiences, and learn more about Scratch. Find out more, join an event or organize one yourself.