We are proud to announce the new Etoys 4.1, which you can now download from our website. We provide installers for Windows and Macintosh machines. There is also a "to-go" version that you can put on a USB thumb drive to take with you. Linux packages should be available shortly by the distribution of your choice.

This has been a world-wide volunteer effort. Kudos to all contributors!


What's new in Etoys 4.1?

New features

  • added DrGeo for exploring geometry (see new example project)
  • objects can have speech bubbles (see "speech bubbles" tile category)
  • you can now easily create a new flap, find it in supplies
  • Sketches support two new tiles: "flip left right" and "flip up down" (in the "graphics" category)
  • the world has tiles in its "geometry" category now
  • there is a timer tile counting seconds ("playfield" category of world and other playfields)
  • new soundReverb preference lets you toggle a hall effect for each project
  • QuickGuides are translated now
  • preferences can be set permanently
  • use control-right click to easily resize objects
  • both control-click and cmd-click bring up the halo on Mac

Improvements / Bug Fixes

  • "translatable" option of Text object is not enabled by default (turn it on in a Text's halo menu)
  • "stop sound" tile now stops sounds started with "make sound" tile in addition to "play frequency of" tile
  • bigger arrows are now shown in tiles on mouse-over (preference usePopUpArrows is enabled by default)
  • when changing a variable's value using the up/down arrows, they now change based on the number of decimal places
  • you can now change a circle's diameter by setting its "width" or "length"
  • TimesRepeat tile no longer allows you to set the number of repeats to a negative number
  • Users can no longer delete the paint box when painting
  • Fixed Bug so Holder's cursor does not extend beyond the width of the Holder
  • a variable can now be named 'val'
  • the 'fire' tile of an event theater's playback-button works now
  • reverting of book pages works correctly now
  • fix "overlaps any" tile
  • fix error when creating a script in Greek
  • fix copying non-latin text
  • "Demon Castle" tutorial renamed to "Etoys Castle", avoids controversial wording, mentions Cmd key to bring up halo on Mac one-button mouse.
  • no automatic save on stop under Sugar, must use keep button (enable sugarAutoSave preference to revert to old behavior)
  • made OLPC "view-source" key work in newer Sugar versions

Preferences

  • Etoys can now store preferences permanently
  • to do this, choose "set automatically on startup…" from a preference's menu
  • to restore factory settings, use the "Reset preferences on start up" button in the preferences panel
  • preferences are stored in the Etoys preferences folder. On the Mac that's "Library/Application Support/Etoys/prefs", on Linux ".etoys/prefs", on Windows 7/Vista "%USERPROFILE%\AppData\LocalLow\etoys\prefs", on Windows XP "%APPDATA%\etoys\prefs"
  • confusing buttons on the first page of the Preferences panel are hidden now

Help Guides

  • QuickGuides (the help cards you see by clicking the "?" button in the toolbar) were translated to Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian, and (some) French.
  • Users can create their own QuickGuides for their own curriculum.
  • QuickGuides are allowed to have an index.txt to specify the order of guides in a category and the full UTF-8 name of the guide in its own language (file names are ASCII)

Translations

  • translations broken up in smaller files
  • added languages zh_CN, ca, sk, kn
  • Some of the languages are not fully translated. If you wish to help please visit http://translate.sugarlabs.org/projects/ and click on "Etoys", then submit your suggestions.

For developers

  • system organized in packages
  • developed using Monticello
  • added pragma support
  • better targeting menu for sliders, buttons and menus

Known Issues in Etoys 4.1

  • Uploading a project from Etoys to Squeakland does not work if you are behind a proxy. Please use a Web Browser to upload projects in this case.
  • On Snow Leopard, the Web Browser Plugin works unreliable in Safari. We recommend to use Firefox in the mean time.
  • If you encounter issues in the Web Browser Plugin, try clicking the Full Screen button in the Etoys tool bar. This can fix animation sluggishness, as well as wrong key or button mappings.
  • On platforms other than Linux, switching to Vietnamese brings up an error window.
  • Copying objects between projects copies a Sketch and not the object. As a work-around, put the object into a flap shared between projects.

Contributors to Etoys 4.1


Code

Bert Freudenberg, Ricardo Moran, Korakurider, Karl Ramberg, K. K. Subramaniam, Jerome Peace, Hilaire Fernandes, Ted Kaehler, Eliot Miranda, Derek O'Connell, Masashi Umezawa, Rita Freudenberg

Content (QuickGuides, Example Projects)

Kathleen Harness, Stephen Thomas, Hilaire Fernandes, Bert Freudenberg, Sdenka Salas, Stephen Trofinoff, Martin Bettge, Franz Maritsch, Rüdeger Baumann, Luis Valente, Carlos Rabassa

Translations

Korakurider, Carlos Rabassa, Markus Schlager, and all Sugar/OLPC translators, led by Sayamindu Dasgupta and Chris Leonhard

Bug Reports / Testing

Carlos Rabassa, Rita Freudenberg, Cherry Withers, Randall Caton, Steven Thomas, Kathleen Harness, Milan Zimmerman, Yoshiki Ohshima, Scott Wallace, Sayamindu Dasgupta, Timothy Falconer, Marian Prochocky, Masashi Umezawa, Markus Schlager

Hosting/Support

Tim Falconer and Jon Kern of Immuexa

Ken Causey of squeak.org

ESUG for supporting the Google Summer of Code project