Private folders

[Bruce Sherwood]

You can now create private folders at glowscript.org. When you create a new folder, just uncheck the Public check box.

When a new user registers, both a Private folder and a Public folder will be created.

Three examples of how a private folder might be useful:

(1) You're developing a new program and you don't want anyone to see it in its incompleted state.

(2) You're writing a program to graph your personal finances and don't wish to share the information.

(3) You have programs that you want to be able to show to an audience but you don't want the code to be available to others. An example of this is the educational setting where you might be demonstrating the results of solving a computational homework problem but you don't want to display the solution.

With respect to (3), I'll comment that there are various schemes for "obfuscating" or "uglifiying" JavaScript code, so you might think you could use export your code (which ends up as JavaScript), obfuscate it, and put it on your own web site. However, it happens that there are "beautifiers" that will do quite a good job of undoing the obfuscation.

You might think GlowScript could implement "execute-only" programs, which someone could run but not be able to see the program code. It happens that browsers contain debuggers that among much else make it possible to see the original program code.

So really the only way to keep the code hidden is to put it in a private folder and only run it yourself.

When someone goes to your GlowScript location, folder tabs corresponding to private folders are not displayed, so there isn't a way to see their contents. If someone somehow knows the specific URL for a private folder or a program within the private folder, they get an error message when they try to go there.

At the moment there is no visual clue reminding you that one or more of your folders is private. I hope to make the folder tab for a private folder a different color, but I'm not sure how to do that yet.