Sniff is a "Scratch-like" programming language that's designed to help Scratchers move gently from Scratch to more conventional languages. They can start writing programs, without having to learn a new language because Sniff is based on Scratch. They learn a little more about variables, compiling, syntax errors (!), and they can have fun controlling real hardware while they're doing it.

Wednesday, 12 October 2016

Release 29 : Back to school!

Teaching has started again, which has pushed this release back a bit. Finally I've got a quiet few days to push out the latest fixes and features!

The first thing you'll notice if you use SniffPad is that syntax highlighting has improved a bit... variable names are now blue, which is handy as it means there's a visual indicator that you've spelt a variable name wrong when you type it, rather than getting a weird error message some time later. You might have noticed this already if you've tried live.sniff.org.uk.

The headline feature is of course MQTT support. There'll be more posts on that over the next few days, but if you want to place Arduino's to measure and control things using a network, then you should be very excited. Combining Sniff and MQTT makes building network sensor about 8 lines of code, and it will integrate with whatever control system you want to run on your central servers.

There's also the usual round of bug fixes and tweaks that are really important, but too small to mention.

Head over to the downloads page to grab a copy.

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