Eng:Experimental Viewer

The Experimental Viewer was a way to play projects online. It was part of preliminary experimenting to design future versions of Scratch online.

Features
The Experimental Viewer allowed users to view projects in a relatively normal fashion, but one could also view and change the project's scripts while still online. In order to access blocks to change the scripts, a user clicked on one of the colored squares to the right of where the project is shown. They were ordered as: Motion, Looks, Sound, Triggers (all the Hat and broadcast blocks), Control, Sensing, Operators and Variables in top to bottom order, respectively. This new arrangement of categories is used in Scratch 2.0. Users could also edit existing scripts.

Although Scratch 1.4's basic functionality is implemented in the Experimental Viewer, it did not allow you to create or edit costumes and backgrounds. The "clean up" and comment features, help windows, and duplication and deletion of scripts were also absent. The projects could be neither saved nor shared from the Experimental Viewer.

Using the Experimental Viewer
If a user navigates to a page that was deleted by the Scratch Team they could choose to "opt in" to access of the Experimental Viewer, which allowed the user to view projects in it. To run a project in the Experimental Viewer, a user clicked on the link under the heading of "Play with the code." This will open up a new window, with the Experimental Viewer in it. If a user did not want to open a new window, they simply had to edit the URL of a project by taking out the "/projects" portion, and adding "/experimental/viewproject", though they had to leave the "/username/project ID" section in.

When the Experimental Viewer is in use, it records mouse clicks. If a user chose to participate (opt in), they are agreed to allow the Scratch Team to record and analyze this information in order to understand usage patterns and inform improvements on the design. They could also 'Opt out' at any time.

Blocks
Version 2010.07.25 had 16 motion blocks, 20 looks blocks, 13 sound blocks, 11 pen blocks, 6 triggers blocks (events), 10 control blocks, 17 sensing blocks, 17 operators blocks, and no variable blocks (though the category was there), making 110 blocks in total. All blocks in this version can be found in 2.0.

Removal
Around March 2011, the Scratch Team removed the Experimental Viewer, although until the release of Scratch 2.0, users were still able to use the player here. It is, however, still available on the ScratchR repository as a download here, as well as online (on djdolphin's archive) here (oldest version) and here (newer version).

How to Detect
There was also a way to detect if the player of a project was using the Experimental Viewer. An obsolete block was needed.