Here’s another update on my pet project, for my several loyal readers, plus all the others following tosh with interest.

In the time since my last proper update, I’ve done a lot:

• I went to Scratch2015AMS. (Amsterdam is basically a big version of Cambridge, UK.) I really should have presented tosh…

  Connor and Michael and I accidentally got interviewed on camera. Fortunately, few people have found the video!

  We saw John and Jens' GP programming language in action for the first time, which was pretty cool.

• On Scratch, the hype about tosh has become its own meme. This is entirely not my fault. (If someone says “tosh tosh tosh” one more time, I’m going to scream.)

• There’ll be a native Mac app, in addition to the free web app. Buying the app supports development and gets you a shiny app: it works offline, supports autosave, and can load bigger project files. (Opening & saving files from inside a web page is a pain.) I’ve also been asked for a way to donate directly, since not everyone has a Mac.

• It started to actually look good:

  

• I made this quick and terrible screencast to show tosh in action.

• Yesterday I took a new photo for the homepage. Like last time, it’s an “arty” photo taken of my Retina screen. But I have a proper camera now, so the result looks considerably fancier.

  I won’t share it here, so as not to spoil the surprise. (And it might not be the final version anyway, since I want to iterate on the angles/lenses used once more to get it perfect!)

Features

Tosh has gained lots of vital new features in the past seven months, including:

• Defining variables

  You can now define variables in tosh. So that’s pretty useful pic.twitter.com/rzDg5OyJCv

  — tjvr_ (@blob8108) August 19, 2015

• Project open/save

• “Cleaning up” scripts into a single vertical column when saving

  Measuring scripts (so tosh can “clean up” the scripting area when it exports to .sb2) is my least favourite activity. pic.twitter.com/bE6JfqqUgf

  — tjvr\_ (@blob8108) August 19, 2015

• Custom blocks

  Yay, tosh has basic custom blocks working! pic.twitter.com/zxnVFGHuYi

  — tjvr_ (@blob8108) August 29, 2015

• Sprite switching (I had to have two goes at this. The first time had lots of unusual bugs; this time it’s incredibly robust)

• Importing costumes, plus rename/delete/rearrange

• A new sprite button, plus rename/delete/rearrange

• Undo/redo support (I’m really pleased with this one. Because of my silly JS library, the undo manager is about sixty lines of code!)

• Small stage mode, plus working fullscreen support

• Variable name validation (you can read some of the design behind this; I’ll probably write about it separately)

• And I still want to rewrite auto-complete for a third time.

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What’s left is mostly refinements: fixing bugs and adding polish. I want to make sure before release that it’s solid enough for you to use.

While you wait, you can enjoy this cat vomiting marshmallows!