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Scratch Team Blog: April 2012

Scratch 2.0 website development

Monday, April 23, 2012

Scratch 2.0 is a collaboration, with different people working on different parts of the same project. Most of the Scratch Team's time and effort is spent thinking carefully about how to make Scratch 2.0 easy and intuitive for people who are new to programming. Developers help turn those ideas into working code.
The movie below is a visualization that shows how one part of Scratch 2.0 - the website code - has grown and changed as we work on it. Each dot represents a file that's part of Scratch 2.0. The figures that dart in and out, making changes to existing files and adding new ones, are the developers. As you'll see, Champika Fernando, the lead developer of the Scratch 2.0 website, has changed a lot of files, along with John Maloney and Sayamindu Dasgupta. And of course, the entire Scratch Team has been thinking carefully about the design of things (something which this visualization does not show).

Lots of Scratchers have been asking us when Scratch 2.0 will be ready. It's still too soon to name an exact date, but we're planning to launch Scratch 2.0 later this year. As soon as we have a timetable for release, we’ll post an announcement in our forums.
Got questions or comments? You can join in the discussion about this blog post on the Scratch forums.

Scratch 2.0 Update: New Name, New Mascot!

Sunday, April 01, 2012

Edit: We hope you enjoyed this April Fools Joke! And don't worry, Scratch 2.0 will still be called Scratch.

Cats were once very popular on the internets, but that time has passed. It's time to update our look and feel before we release Scratch 2.0! We thought long and hard about what new animal to choose. Then we realized the answer was staring us in the face every time we browse the webs: Ponies. Cats Scratch - something that's mean and hurtful. But what do ponies do? They Neigh! So Scratch 2.0 will no longer be called Scratch - it'll be called Neigh!
Got questions or comments? Share them on this forum thread!
Want to read a longer (14,000 word - TL;DR) explanation of why we made the change? You can find it here.