Chirp Blog

I have uploaded a little experimental prototype of a utility that lets you turn a Scratch Project into a “stand-alone” executable for Windows. You can get it from the download page.

Urgent demand for something like this has been expressed for a long time by many members of the Scratch community in the Scratch Forums. I don’t really know what’s behind all this. It seems that many children (and adults) feel that they’re not really programming, as long as they can’t make an exe out of their work. Others seem to be so proud of their creations, that they want to “hide the code” at all costs, lest others find out about their intellectual “secret weapons” and “copy” them. Another user group in seemingly dire need to hide code can be found among educators. There seems to be a didactical necessity for students to recreate a teacher’s example on their own, without knowing how the teacher did it…

I find these motivations - to put it mildly - questionable and technically ridiculous. But then, if being able to make an exe is all that it takes to turn people on to programming in Scratch and make the community grow, then give these people what they want, “panem et circenses”.

The technical details of my “fake” compiler are as of now too trivial to discuss, but what did you expect, being able to translate Scratch projects into assembler?

I have just updated Chirp with the following three new features:

• Whenever you directly run a project in presentation mode (using the “presentation” command line option) and press the return-button, Chirp will exit back to the OS (and not switch to development mode).
• If you start Chirp with the “presentation” command line argument without specifying a Scratch project, it will run a random project from the Scratch-projects folder. If that folder is empty Chirp will start in development mode instead.
• Building on these modifications I have written a tiny Windows screensaver (Chirp.scr) which plugs into the Windows screensaver list and thereby lets you use your own Scratch projects as Windows screensavers.

You can upgrade to the current version by downloading the Windows installer and installing it over your current Chirp installation (no need to uninstall Chirp first).

I have tested the Screensaver under Windows XP and ME. I would be grateful if someone could test it under Vista and tell me if it works.

Chirp is a slightly modified experimental version of the MIT-Scratch development environment based on the publicly accessible Scratch Source Code. Chirp aims to stay fully compatible with Scratch and with the Scratch website, while allowing to follow up on suggestions and ideas arising out of discussions among the Scratch community.

Currently Chirp is my personal project, but I welcome any contributions from the community, be it Squeak changesets, Scratch skins or other graphics (logos, icons, screenshots, whatever). I will use this blog to announce any future updates.