awkward speech bubble adjustment

[maryfries]

The speech bubble moves down when the sprite is near the top of the stage, but the arrow on the bubble ends up pointing in the wrong place, which can make for an awkward interface: It's not clear what that "me" is referring to here.

[jmoenig]

So, do we need to make speech bubbles pointing middle-right, middle-down, middle-left, middle-up, left-down, right-down, top-right, bottom-right etc. etc. etc.?

Perhaps speech bubbles aren't the right tool for everything, maybe use the "label" block to write some instructions on the screen? Another idea: I often see kids making clever projects in which one sprite is a "sayer" and another sprite is the one the user interacts with.

[maryfries]

Would more bubble pointers be easy enough? I do think that would work... Thanks!

[brianharvey]

@jmoenig Mary isn't good at sarcasm. :-)

So, there are already two directions, left and right. The case under discussion, in which the sprite is too close to the top of the stage for the speech balloon to fit, is already handled specially with respect to the position of the balloon. But the special handling puts the balloon at the top of the stage; I suggest that most of the time it would be better to line up the top of the balloon with the top of the sprite and then use an upward-pointing tail. Besides looking weird, the current arrangement can be really confusing if there happens to be another sprite down where the tail points! The "middle" cases you're worrying about won't happen unless the amount of text is more than half the size of the stage, right? I think people who say huge texts deserve weird-looking speech balloons, but sometimes a sprite is moving around randomly and the project author really can't predict where the balloon will end up relative to the sprite.

(It's true that upward-pointing speech balloons are relatively rare in comic books, but those aren't animated and are drawn by professionals.)

[jmoenig]

:-D

I was only half-sarcastic. Truth is, that if we want to really use speech balloons as labels, we will have to end up with something a lot more flexible than the current left-/right orientation from Scratch. I've actually been contemplating this to myself before, because often these other bubble pointers (e.g. the middle ones) could come in handy in other contexts as well, for example as tool tips. So, no hard feeling about Mary's answer, it was totally provoked^^

[brianharvey]

Well in that case... The optimal solution would be to compute the tail so it points directly at the sprite!