April 4th 2023
Scratch addons can really help you as you progress in scratch. When you have a big project you would find it very frustrating to search for every custom block definition or broadcast reciever by hand, luckily smoeone made an addon for that. Scratch addons also comes in useful in troobleshooting, since there is a debugger addon and a clone count reporter. These two addons made troobleshooting in scratch so much easier for me when I istalled Scratch Addons. Also scratch addons can help you customize the look and feel of the website and editor, such as the dark theme addon or the view in turbowarp addon.
the clone counter addon comes in useful when you have many clones and you want to see if all of them get deleted in the right place. For example you have a menu made of clones and if they don't get deleted when you start playing then you'll immediately see that in the clone counter.
The block counter addon is pretty simple it adds the number of blocks in your project at the top of the editor this can be used to compare the size of different projects.
The Editor find bar is a really helpful addon because when you try to navigate across a big scratch project (I mean like really big 1000+ blocks) it will be very hard to find specific scripts because there are just too many so your eye will search for that script for like a minute. This addon adds a find bar where you can easily find: custom blocks(functions), Event recievers(broadcast hat blocks) and variable uses in the sprite you are currently in.
The cat blocks addon isn't actually essential, but it's funny to see all hat blocks now have cat ears and eyes. I think that it's a good addon and makes the boring hat blocks disappear, but you can stick to the hat blocks if you like. Cat blocks were invented for April fools day on scratch, since then there were some people who liked it so much they made an addon for it.
The Sprite folder addon is useful when you have a lot of sprites in a specific category, but you don't need them shown all at once. The sprite folder addon creates a folder which you can name and see inside of it when needed but all the sprites inside it size down to the size of a single sprite when the folder is closed. Everything which is described here is also applied to costumes.
The Cloud games addon displays cloud games and their users under the "games" widget in the browser extension icon. This addon helps a lot when picking a cloud game you want to play, so you automatically know how many people are playing which game. Games that are included into the widget are for example griffpatch's slither.io clones or the multiplayer cloud platformer.
It is such a pain when you discover that a broadcast you named with a typo can't be renamed and changed, this is where the rename broadcasts addon comes in, it allows you to rename broadcast that you either misspelled or you want to reuse for something else than you initially planned to. This addon helped me out so much throughout my scratch experience because it gives broadcasts with a bad name a second chance.
The custom code area zoom addon allows you to set your own limit on how far you can zoom out in the scratch code editor. This addon is especially useful for big projects (1000+ blocks) this is where you can see all your code without having to scroll. Personally I use it because it is very useful when working with a lot of code and it allows you to get al overview of you project.
When designing sprites in scratch you use the costume editor. Sometimes you need something to be center aligned, but be above the center of the canvas. the Costume Editor Snapping addon snaps objects to the middle of the canvas far away from the center point. the addon also allows you to snapp objects to be on the same longtitude or latitude so that it is much easier to align objects. I would highly recommend this addon to anyone who uses the scratch costume editor to draw their sprites.
Do you know the palette with all the blocks is so annoying when you don't need it and takes up so much space on the screen. Yeah I know many scratcher would like it to just automatically disappear while you're coding and you don't need it. Well, if you think so too you're lucky, because this addon solves the problem for you, it hides the palette when you're not hovering above the block category menu so it saves a ton of space and leaves it available to coders which get all the space to code they need.
You know when you never want variables to show on the stage they do right, and that is so annoying. If you agree with me you will probably want to not show so that it's not as frustrating to delete them all off the stage. This addon is specifically made to hide the annoying variable reporters on the stage, and I hope after you've installed this, you won't be as frustrated as now.
Basically this addon expands the code area to the limits, it is now full screen and perfect for a time when testing isn't needed because then you can focus on the code more than the stage. So if you like to have a big code area, and you don't mind to wait for testing this is a perfect addon for you.
Block switching is an addon you just have to install, it helps A LOT. What it does is it adds blocks of a similar category when you right click a specific block. For example if you right click a change y by block it will show you: change y by, set y to, change x by and set x to blocks. An example of this block's use is when you have a duplicated show-block, but you want it to be a hide-block you can just right click it and tada you set the block to a hide block and it appears instead of the show block
The debugger addon is exceptionally useful, probably even more useful than the block switching addon. The debugger addon adds many new features such as a "log" block or a a thread manager and even a console where you can see all important events happen such as sprite cloning. This addon saves your life when sometimes you only then notice that clones are cloning clones which is really bad because there are only 300 clones allowed in scratch.
this addon is exceptionally useful for drawing in the scratch image editor because it allows you to not have the usual effect which happens when you paste an item. This shifting of pasted items is really annoying so this addon was made and it removes this feature. This means you can now have all pasted items in one spot.