Hackety Hack and Scratch on The Beeb

May 15th 15:05
by why

Hey, some folks wrote in to mention a bit of good press for Hackety Hack, piggybacked on this BBC article covering Scratch. It’s great to share an article with this incredibly promising tool.

Scratch is a colorful programming tool for fitting together constructs as if they were LEGO blocks. The use of color and shape in Scratch is just ingenius. (In my opinion, much better than dragging around and plugging in the cables of Yahoo! Pipes.) Actions are puzzle-piece and conditionals are diamonds. (So an “if” would accept a diamond and a set of puzzle pieces.) The means of sharing Scratch programs on the web as Java applets is quite sly.

Scratch is powered by Squeak, which is an incredible technology that has just really suffered a lack of style. Both Squeak and eToys have always felt cluttered to me - uhh, which way do I go? - but Scratch cleans it all up and adds a very natural veneer. Sometime I’d like to dip into the Scratch image and work on a hands-on tutorial for it. The help files are, sadly, just a pile of HTML and PDFs.

In other Hackety Hack news, I’ll also bring your attention to the video at right, wherein a Japanese blogger takes a casual pace through writing a program to pull feeds from Amazon.jp. The music for this video begs for periodic flashing CALL NOW. 1-800-H-ETY-HHH. (DivX download.)

8 comments

Giovanni Corriga

said on May 15th 16:47

Squeak, which is an incredible technology that has just really suffered a lack of style.

We could use some of your style. Why don’t you pay us a visit, and lend a hand?

It would be insanely great!

beppu

said on May 15th 17:36

I liked the background music. :)

LninYo

said on May 15th 20:49

I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Scratch was based on squeak. I’m so glad they did Scratch (and yeah.. I also kind of got lost in the squeak stock interface when I was playing with it some time back)

LninYo

said on May 15th 20:51

oh and this is like TEH BEST screencast I’ve ever seen! I wish all of them were so relaxed and cool

thanks for posting the link to it _why!

Klondike

said on May 17th 08:01

Ah, hahahahaha, this music is amazing screencast material.

Tau

said on May 20th 07:55

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE!

Thanks for sharing the vid.

Meee

said on May 20th 16:12

can someone translate this please? thx.

Huh?

said on May 28th 11:10

Wrong video?

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