[maybelsyrup]

This is exactly the sort of fun, random, small project that reminds me of the more anarchic and playful older days of computing and the web. Those days are gone and not coming back, but their spirit lives on in things like this.

It’s not some earth shattering YCombinator thing, it’s not a SaaS, it’s not (at least to my eye) about money — it’s a neat thing to do with a piece of screen real estate we all look at a million times a day. Not to be melodramatic but the world needs a lot more “heh, neat”.

[irusensei]

Not so early internet but what happened to over the top Compiz 3D cube desktops and wobbly windows that catch on fire when closed?

[razemio]

Some of it is still there.

3D Cube: https://github.com/Schneegans/Desktop-Cube

Burning Windows: https://github.com/Schneegans/Burn-My-Windows

[dhosek]

There used to be a great rotating cube animation in OS X when you locked the screen or switched users with fast user switching. It was especially impressive on the 24" iMac screen (I remember being delayed going to lunch one day because everyone in the office wanted to see it in action).

[bitwize]

Older ThinkPads had accelerometers in them to detect when the machine had been dropped and park the disk heads in the instant before it hit the floor hard to avoid data destruction. A Linux driver was written for this accelerometer, and someone had configured Compiz to shift to the virtual desktop immediately to the left or right, depending on which side the laptop had been smacked.

Now that's hack value.

[b1ue64]

Wayfire is like compiz but as an independent Wayland compositor: https://wayfire.org/

[kQq9oHeAz6wLLS]

A couple months ago I loaded compiz on my Debian box. I messed with a lot of the eye candy, then settled into a few fun gee-gaws, like switching virtual desktops via rotating cube, windows that desaturate when not focused, etc and still am using it today. Puts a little whimsy back into my work day.

[Fatnino]

There was one screensaver that would make your cube slowly rotate while all your windows (still displaying live content, mind you) would swirl around on the inside like papers caught in a small tornado.

[airstrike]

Rotating cube desktops are such good UI/UX I wish they were more mainstream... it really helps compartmentalizing tasks into different virtual/mental spaces

[rektide]

It's a long way around but I think/believe we'll have some general purpose computing/systems research wins, that start to expose some computing as fun, interesting, casual, and from there we'll see a budding "heh, neat" attitude.

The atmosphere around computing had gotten hypersaturated by the intense capital flows & software heavy-industries that have built up. Serving the industrial need has been an overehelming priority. And it's really outshadowed much of the fart around & make fun stuff element that made it a scene of interest for so long.

I continue to tend to believe there's a ton of looming change in what computing will be when it grows up more. While most of that work gets concentrated in refinement & iteration & support of heavy-industrial software, we also keep finding/stumbling on stupendously more straightforward ways of doing things (react components/vdom, then hoc, then hooks). The ability of very small ideas to more capably express computing has enormous implications.

The web is interesting here because the page is a bit of a canvas, resculptable by anyone knowing a little introductory javascript+html+css. Whatever innovation computing has, ultimately most of it strongly contrasts, is esoteric, no matter how useful it could be. Almost all the work is sent through an extremely small funnel where a handful of people are at all familiar with the system. For bigger libraries, it might be hundreds. It's bad that most works are obscure & inaccessible, but worse, most software being opaque means rven though it's everywhere around us, we never can learn it. The world is obscure, it's mechanism happening at nanoscale levels we cant get to & which are still down-compiled assembly codes with most of the meaning wiped away.

Computing needs a kick towards extropic ends. Creativity will re-emerge, but only if there's an exosystem or ecosystem of computing, and right now we are small isolated islands, producing appliances, fixed systems, not computing software. Somewhere computing has to start letting users back in.

[qbasic_forever]

I remember this kind of purely for fun desktop stuff was all over Windows 3.1 and 95. There'd be shareware apps with no purpose other than making bullet holes appear randomly on your screen, or snow flakes fall everywhere. It was wacky and fun vs. the all serious business that operating systems have become today.

[userbinator]

Also interesting is the fact that such software was perfectly capable of rendering those effects with decent performance on hardware of the time --- single core CPUs with a few hundred MHz, barely anything resembling a GPU, and memory usage in the low MBs if not kilobytes. Now even the completely bland and boring, mostly borderless UI of an IM application is ridiculously sluggish on a high-end multicore machine with a "gamer"-class GPU and takes insane amounts of RAM.

[kQq9oHeAz6wLLS]

I had the MST3K "creeping error" program that put the guys on screen like when they were watching a movie. They'd randomly make a comment or move. It was pretty fun,and totally useless.

[trelane]

xroach says hello. https://software.opensuse.org/package/xroach

Oh! And XSnow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xsnow

[dhosek]

Or the old desktop extensions of the early Mac days like talking moose or the one that, when you emptied the trash, had Oscar the Grouch pop out of the trashcan icon and sing, "I love trash"

[davidandgoliath]

Those days are still very much here, there is just a lot more noise from the opposite end of the computing world.