Tools of the trade: Scratch for SL
MIT Media Lab's Eric Rosenbaum has produced a wonderful little tool called Scratch for Second Life (S4SL). Available for Mac or Windows (but not Linux at present, alas) S4SL allows you to create scripts by assembling simple colorful shapes (a bit like plastic bricks).
S4SL is based on MIT's Scratch, and allows you to put together some useful functionality very simply. S4SL isn't going to make you a star creator of scripts overnight, though -- anyone who knows Second Life's LSL scripting language and has a modicum of programming skill can do much more, but that's not the point here.
The point here, is that it puts many elements of basic scripting within reach of those who aren't scripters, requiring from them only the most basic skill of a programmer: The ability to describe the problem.
Having assembled your functionality from S4SL's candy-colored blocks, you can simply press the Copy Linden Script button and then paste that into a new script item in-world. S4SL even supports a kind of turtle-functionality more familiar to those who grew up with Logo.
Don't be fooled by the 0.1 version number -- so far as we've seen, S4SL works very well indeed, and we've yet to see any real bugs with it. A script created by S4SL can even be pasted back into the S4SL editor for additional manipulation. The code structure that it was generated from is preserved in code comments.
Even if you are a solid LSL scripter, S4SL can ease the development of some components, allowing you to let it handle some of the more straightforward heavy-lifting, while freeing you up to work on overall logic and fitting pieces together.
Interested in what S4SL can do? Take a look at the handy little video, then visit the site and grab yourself a copy of this wonderful tool.
