After more than two years of pre-release versions of Small Basic, we are finally releasing the 1.0 version.  Although we know that there a number of features we still haven’t implemented, we feel that Small Basic now has a solid set of the core features that make it useful to beginners.  We hope to get everyone onto the 1.0 version so that we have a common baseline to move forward.

Over the past few months, we have been focused largely on our online experience and also the Small Basic translation efforts.  There is a huge demand for Small Basic outside the US, and so we want to help beginners in other parts of the world to get started in programming.  Here’s what’s new:

• Small Basic 1.0 – Small Basic 1.0 is a minor update to version .95 with the following changes:
  • The Icelandic language was added through the great work of a volunteer in the community.  (Thanks to Jon B Georgsson!)  The addition of Icelandic brings us to 20 languages.  That’s pretty amazing and demonstrates both the strong demand for local versions of Small Basic for and also the great support we have from the global Small Basic community.
  • We updated the Small Basic setup and version information.
  • Some editorial bugs were fixed in the strings used by Small Basic.
  • The End User License Agreement (EULA) has been updated to reflect that Small Basic is no longer considered ‘Pre-Release’ software.

Although we haven’t really added new features in 1.0, besides Icelandic, we do have a list of feature requests from users, and we are looking at how we can add them in the future.  I also want to let you know about some new Small Basic extensions from our friends at the TeachingKidsProgramming website.  More details below…

TeachingKidsProgramming provides free courseware to introduce kids (ages 10+) to programming.  New in this compatible release of the Small Basic Fun extensions (http://extendsmallbasic.codeplex.com) is a recipe '(m)adLibs' which you can use to introduce the MVC pattern to your kids.  It includes several new objects, such as a Viewer and a Parser to support teaching of this pattern.

• New Small Basic website on MSDN – A lot of work has gone into re-creating the Small Basic website.  We hope you will find it useful.  In addition to a new look and cleaner design, we have also partnered with Computer Science for Kids to publish sample chapters from several of their Small Basic E-books on our site.  We hope you will find these high-quality guides useful for learning and having fun with Small Basic.
• Translated Curriculum – We’ve been receiving requests from abroad for translated versions of our teaching curriculum.  So over the last several months we have put a lot of effort into making this curriculum available in more languages.  This is a work in progress as some languages still have English screenshots, but we do now have all languages translated.  You can find the curriculum here.

Finally, we’d like to thank the Small Basic community for your passion around this product and for teaching young people the joys of computer programming.  The Small Basic Virtual Team shares your passion, and we look forward to our continued partnership on this project.

The Small Basic Virtual Team

Czech is now part of the Small Basic family and it is released for the first time in this latest version 0.95. We also updated some of the Korean strings after receiving some great feedback from one teacher from Korean. No functionality has been added or changed from version 0.9.

Download the new version here!

Translated Czech user guide will be available in the next few weeks here.

If you are looking for a self-paced learning or teaching Small Basic tutorial, check out http://computerscienceforkids.com.  Phil Conrod has a passion for writing tutorials and books aimed at beginner programmers and he’s done an excellent job of covering all the fundamentals of Small Basic programming.  He has also published a faithful port of David Ahl’s Computer Adventures for Small Basic.  Check it out for some cool game ideas!

Lynn Langit and Llewellyn Falco are very active in the programming world, chasing their passion of teaching programming to kids.  They have been using Small Basic successfully, for over a year now, to introduce hundreds of kids to programming.  As an aid to help understand the programming concepts, they have created very interesting Small Basic recipes. 

Recently, they have put together a website (http://teachingkidsprogramming.org) where they have been adding content to both teachers and students.  It’s really cool – check it out.

Marking the 300k download milestone, comes the 9th installment of Small Basic, the fastest and the best yet!  This version of Small Basic packs a ton of bug fixes, performance improvements and some of the most requested features. 

Download the new version here!

Firstly, the Small Basic compiler and runtime have been overhauled and the result is a big performance gain.  Some tight loop programs run up to 4 times faster than the previous versions.  This has been the primary focus of the release.

Next, we have new additions to the library. 

• We now have a Controls object that allows you to add Buttons and TextBoxes and react to click and text change events. 
• The Shapes object adds support for adding/modifying, animating and zooming text.  This is extremely useful for displaying and updating text frequently, like the score in a game.
• The Sound object now has a new operation, PlayMusic, which plays music described by a subset of Music Markup Language supported by QBasic.  An example is: Sound.PlayMusic("O5 C8 C8 G8 G8 A8 A8 G4 F8 F8 E8 E8 D8 D8 C4")

And then, there are the bug fixes.  I won’t go into the details but there are a ton of fixes.  An important update is the change in the default extension for Small Basic documents.  Small Basic documents get a default extension of “.smallbasic” instead of “.sb” to avoid conflicts with MIT’s Scratch.

Last, but certainly not the least, is the support for right-to-left languages and the first localized language in that series is Arabic.  Also included are Dutch and Polish versions, bringing the count of supported languages to 15!

Alex, a 9 year old programmer from Russia has been learning programming using Small Basic, and has showcased his new learning by porting over the famous Tower of Hanoi to Small Basic.   

You can check it out and play with it by importing HANOI from Small Basic.  You can download the latest version of Small Basic here.

You can also play the game in your browser here.

Zeven, a Small Basic forumer has created a very cool sample that visualizes different sorting algorithms.  It is neat to see and compare the efficiencies of the algorithms.  You can download the program directly on to your Small Basic IDE by importing the program id SORTVIZ.

Or you can check the program out directly on your browser here: http://smallbasic.com/program/?SORTVIZ

To write your own fun programs and games, download the latest version of Small Basic here.

LitDev, a very active Small Basic Forum participant has started a thread with a bunch of Small Basic programs that illustrate fascinating optical illusions.  Here are some below – click on the link below the images and you can actually view them on your browser.

 
http://smallbasic.com/program/?PVC930

http://smallbasic.com/program/?CDV606

http://smallbasic.com/program/?FMW356

http://smallbasic.com/program/?CNR593

http://smallbasic.com/program/?TTR706

Go check out the forums for more updates.  You would need to download the latest version of Small Basic to be able to modify and create new illusions.

One Program, Two Platforms!

Did you know that with Small Basic v0.8, you can write a program or a game and have it run identically on both your desktop and the browser?  This makes it super easy to share your games with your friends (even those that may be running a Mac).

In fact it is so easy that you can have your program deployed, hosted and running on a browser with just one click of a button!  So easy that it might actually be the fastest and friction free authoring environment for Silverlight.

Here’s an example.  Take this simple program I wrote, which animates a bunch of balls on screen.

For i = 1 To 100
  balls[i] = Shapes.AddEllipse(10, 10)
EndFor

While "True"
  For i = 1 To 100
    ball = balls[i]
    
    x = Math.GetRandomNumber(640)
    y = Math.GetRandomNumber(480)
    Shapes.Animate(ball, x, y, 2000)
  EndFor 
  Program.Delay(1900)
EndWhile

When you run this program from Small Basic, you’ll see a window like this, running on your desktop:

When you are ready to share this program with the world, you simply hit the “Publish” button and voila the program is deployed to a Silverlight hosted website.  Check it out for yourself here: http://smallbasic.com/program/?HNV340

Not only can you see your program run on this website, you can also host it on your own website or blog.  Here’s the HTML code to host this little program on your website:

<object id='sbapp' data='data:application/x-silverlight-2,' type='application/x-silverlight-2' width='640' height='480'>
    <param name='source' value='http://smallbasic.com/program/ClientBin/SBWeb.xap'/>
    <param name='onError' value='onSilverlightError' />
    <param name='background' value='white' />
    <param name='minRuntimeVersion' value='3.0.40624.0' />
    <param name='autoUpgrade' value='true' />
    <param name='initParams' value='programId=HNV340' />
</object>

Have fun creating Silverlight apps and games from Small Basic.  And don’t forget to share it with your friends!