We’ve been using this in production for the last three months and I can report it has been fairly smooth overall. Only very minor downtime, and we’ve received a lot of communication from our customers about it, they like it quite a bit. So that’s been nice.
We've submitted numerous GH issues and even tried to chase the developer down on LinkedIn. But he treats the project like a fun, novelty "gift" to the community and doesn't respect the SLAs that any repo maintainer needs to adhere to for my org to put their free code in production.
Currently, we are using Unreal Engine 5 to do our hundreds of architectural physics simulations - the major issue is that UE5 is very slow on *the EC2 instance* (we only have one 2048 core EC2 instance shared between the entire office; we used to use Vercel and Cloudflare but we had to sell our homes to suddenly subscribe to Cloudflare Enterprise (the CF sales guy told us that we would not be allowed to run a CF Worker for more than 30 days without it, even though we had a CF worker run for 37 years, and many of our CF workers have been running before the creation of CF (nobody knows why)) and a giant spike in our Vercel Cuda Function Invocations (for GPGPU compute on the Edge, allowing architects to view the collapse of their buildings with only ~53 ms of latency (compared to ~53 ms without Next.js))). Ball seems much faster (it can run on a Macbook Air), potentially allowing us to save at least several tens of millions of dollars per year on AWS costs.
All common issues! Particularly the cost spikes without a reasonable explanation. Also, the lack of NT support the issue you point to shows could be a problem. Ball runs fine on "M" Apple chips, however :)
It's embarrassing that we don't have NT support already. I have many users of NT on Alpha and MIPS who need Ball for critical services. Here's a convenient patch with a bunch of garbled test cases. Merge that in.
(I'm totally not a state actor looking to socially engineer you to hide an exploit, by the way.)
100% fun satire + a loving shoutout to all the folks who maintain GH projects that start as a labor of love and a desire to share with the community. Please don't let the triage of silly demands like this fictional one destroy your spirit.
More devs need to be good to OSS maintainers. Breaks my heart when I see folks treat public repos and GH issues as a service desk and not a collaboration! (Not saying anyone is doing that for this fun project, but a message I'll use any excuse to promote. Btw... that issue filed was I think someone genuinely helping the project.)
It needs write-ahead logging and better transaction isolation before it can be taken seriously for high transaction volume environments. Neat concept, though.
We initially had this issue as well. So we put a small team of developers to work on the problem and were able to implement our own version of the metastore that supported optimistic concurrency and hidden partitioning. It has significantly improved reliability in stress tests (variable velocity ball bouncing in a hyper-dimensional click-cube environment). however, the larger size of our object store is increasing our monthly S3 costs.
This reminds me of a Lara Croft desktop(?) Screensaver? She climbed onto the window's edges -that were open on your windows screen, rolled, jumped, etc. Sometimes made a comment about you not having cleaned up your desktop.
It was a small executable, than ran with or without sound. It wasn't very random, but it made for an interactive mind distraction on a rough day.
She also walked across the bottom of the screen, out to the right (eg), then you would hear her walking, and eventually she would show up on your left of the screen.
Fun little thing with no particular purpose.
But I think there were sheep, dancing babies (ugh!!), something like Bonzi Buddy rings a bell (I once had to clean something named that off a colleague’s workstation when he reported it thinking it was malware).
There was also toys like this on Linux and Unix too. Most famously xeyes.
I miss the playful era when things like this and novelty screensavers were “cool”.
But if you read the description of its spyware behaviour from a current perspective, it's not that different from the telemetry that’s implemented everywhere and Windows bugging you to use Bing as a search engine.
XRoach was a favourite to run on someone who left their machine unlocked (or their XServer display unprotected) - it makes cockroaches that hide underneath windows, so you only see them when you move or close a window. Then they all scuttled around and hid under other ones!
Ooh, Neko was 1989 - I'm not sure when I first saw the Lunar-Lander game on the Amiga that had a similar mechanism, but it would have been around then.
Gravity vs thrust, with left + right controls, the idea was to carefully land on any of the windows on your desktop.
Analogous to breaking the fourth wall, in a way.
I still recall the scrolling message in that game -- Space is big, Space is dark, It's hard to find, a place to park.
I ran something called Dogz [1] which was a pretty advanced dog simulator. You could train the dog to perform tricks or punish it if it did something you didn't like. They claimed to use AI and it worked very well although I don't know how much much was placebo. In any case, I remember it as being well ahead of its time.
On X11 systems there were also things like xsnow, with snow piling up on your window borders and santa flying in the background. xlemmings, walking/falling on your windows and various variations on this. Xeyes is the 'biggest' or most famous one, but in early linux distro's there were various of these things in the 'games' sections.
There was also an application that took a screenshot of your current desktop and then gave you a bunch of weapons - bats, guns, bombs - and allowed you to smash it to pieces.
Small story, friend of mine had a malware package, it needed a backdoor installed; he had a tool to merge the backdoor with any other application, so he used a cute desktop sheep thing. I put it on my parents' computer, then could have the client on my side instruct it to take and send screenshots.
We also set it up at school (IT degree) on the shared computers, but I think a sysadmin found out. We didn't get in trouble, but a classmate was caught and nearly expelled.
There was also this desktop program where you would choose from different weapons, I don't remember for which purpose... anyone knows what I'm talking about?
I remember Tiny Elvis from the 90s. He would sit in your tray and pop up once in a while and say something like "whoa...get a load of the size of that pixel" and then he would pinwheel his arms with the classic stance and dance his way back to the tray.
Would love to have an AI character on my desktop that would flip me shit for having clutter and ask if they can ‘clean up around here’ and carry files into folders
Anyone remember the Nike one? Where you could shoot a football into the desktop and it would burn it, or the player could slide and it would tear the picture
One of my first memories is of my dad showing me how Oscar the Grouch was in his Mac trash can, and sang, “I love trash!” when he put something in there. Haven’t thought of that in many years, but it was the first thing I thought of when I saw this.
Even well into the PPC era Classic Mac OS carried that culture of fun third party software. Can't remember its name, but for example in the late 90s/early 00s I ran across an extension that gave dragged icons gravity and momentum, allowing the user to "throw" them around their desktop. No practical purpose, just fun.
Arguably the Kaleidoscope fits into this category too. While there were tame themes for it that did more tame things like make your Mac look like Windows/BeOS/NeXTSTEP/etc, many third party Kaleidoscope schemes skewed more whacky and fun than your average theme software. Ever wanted your desktop to look like a pair of jeans[0], a dwarven forge[1], 2D top-down space shooter[2], or cute cartoon jungle[3]? Kaleidoscope has you covered.
Wow, I had to check a lot more apps before I found one that used the standard page setup. I eventually relented and opened Pages — for anyone who wishes to bypass all that hunting around!
I feel like the constant upgrade cycle of OSes with API breaking changes around the OS's GUI layer has a tendency to kill off most of these playful apps.
TL;DR: playfulness is killed by the arms race of constantly upgrading to the latest version of everything.
The Energizer Bunny too. You could install it on a lab full of machines, trigger it, and it would march from one to another, banging a drum the whole time.
I want clock, calendar, notes, CPU and system stats, pull out or slide out menus with shortcuts, quirky ones like this one.
Instead what I have is ads.
And copilot everywhere.
With touch screen laptops today you can do so much more. My levono also folds 360 and let's me use it as a full touch screen desktop. There is so much potential for productivity hacks and interactive UX ideas if Windows customization and widgets ecosystem was alive and thriving.
Windows used to be cool! As a kid I remember the Dangerous Creatures CD [1] came with a custom theme for Windows 95. It would change all the icons to cool animal stuff. The "My Computer" icon would change to a frog, the Recycle bin icon would change to a fish, and my favorite, the waiting icon for the mouse cursor would change to a Wasp!
You raise a serious point, oft discussed here (about the sorry state of the OS)
I actually think the "whimsical", nostalgia these kind of apps (toys?) point to is actually indicative of a more serious "yearning" for simpler, higher quality, more user-configurable computing. As it was not so long ago ...
… When computers didn’t all have permanent internet connections, which limited the damage it was possible to do by having a persistent executable running on someone’s computer.
There was little to no spyware or malware risk because this was a time when stealing CPU cycles couldn’t make you money, machines couldn’t be used to anonymously generate internet traffic, and exfiltrating captured data was essentially impossible.
As soon as all the computers went online, the frivolity had to stop.
> As soon as all the computers went online, the frivolity had to stop.
Very insightful. They ceased to be "our" (user's) machines and became "everybody else's" (vendors, criminals, scammers, "debug-by-update" OS-vendors, etc., etc.)
At some point these existed. I'm not sure, maybe on Windows 7?
But they were really sluggish, which made them useless in my opinion. If I have to wait seconds for my widgets to load or react, I'll just write my notes in notepad++ and look at the clock on the taskbar.
For a short while, Windows has come out with desktop notes and system stats widgets. I'm not sure it has those anymore, but the problem is that people's desktops are always covered-up with windows, so those things aren't very helpful.
It would be nice to have a taskbar calendar with appointments and notifications though. But Microsoft will never make something that is both pluggable and simple here. (Android used to have a mainscrean one, but it stopped being pluggable a long time ago. For some reason Linux people don't write those things.)
You want widgets. But you don’t want the average user to slow down their computer with malware infested widgets. You don’t want to spend thanksgiving weekend disinfecting your aunt’s laptop of all the fun toolbars and cute widgets she installed.
So you set a good example. You don’t install frivolous widgets. You tell everybody never to install things that claim they will just make a cute animal appear on their desktop. And even though you know that this bouncy ball widget is safe and fun because you built it from the GitHub repo… you can’t install it because you can’t explain to average user why it’s okay for you to install the fun bouncy ball but they can’t install the kitten that chases a ball of string.
aye, at this point desktop linux is pretty dang mature, and doesn't stream telemetry or error codes unless you explicitly tell it to.
the holdout was gaming, but Steam and Proton work practically flawlessly. one or two other occasional challenges -- a big one was MS Access that was needed for Master's program -- but other than that nothing on Windows that can't ignored / discarded
I have all I need right on my desktop. Expedia deals? Check. Candy Crush? Check. The current weather on the other side of the world using units I don't understand? Check. Everything came pre-installed too, so it's just the out of the box apple experience.
totally reminded me of the days with Windows Blind(?) some crazy dock... you could customise widgets showing bandwidth/disk io/ram/cpu the usual. man those were FUN. but possibly quite power hungry so wouldn't fly nowadays...
There was a very good one, I think back in 2005 - 2007 as part of Google Desktop / Google Desktop Search.
That was back when Google was a respectable company that in addition to the mandatory EULA had a separate notice that informed very very cleary, something like:
READ THIS CAREFULLY
THIS IS NOT THE NORMAL YADDA YADDA
... and then a relatively description of what they were going to to and not.
It had an amazing RSS feed reader widget that would automagically subscribe to feeds from pages on sites I visited and present a relevant selection of links.
Vista was bloated for its time, but man those widgets it had were so fun. Clock, dual car-like speedometers for CPU and RAM, calendar, weather, stocks, sticky notes. Luckily Android copied the idea soon after.
You mean the tabloid news panel? I know it’s called widgets but it’s actually a tabloid news panel. I have no idea why MS thinks people need tabloid news inside their OS but alas. You can’t turn off the tabloid news without turning off the entire panel, ergo effectively Windows doesn’t have widgets.
Fwiw, here is the old Dashboard widget this is based on, for anyone else on an OS old enough to run it. It was a little annoying to dig out of the internet archive.
At the moment of writing this I have no clue what my wallpaper is. I can't remember when was the last time I actually saw my desktop or interacted with it. I am not sure if this ball will also bounce on top of opened windows, but the whole thing made me think about the need for the desktop at all or how it could be made more useful.
Not the OP but I use all the programs full screen / maximized. I change windows with alt+tab or maybe I reach down to the dock to select the app icon quicker. I only see my wallpaper when changing workspaces, because the animation shows it a split second. I do use the command line but it's not the only way to not show the wallpaper. This is true whether I'm on Linux or macOS.
Also me but on Windows 10. I only see the wall paper just after I've booted the machine and within a few seconds at least one window is maximised (typically a tabbed browser), started from the task bar. alt+tab after that
I treat my desktop as a temp dir and manually empty it every few days.
A desktop hygiene tip I read years ago (but can't remember where) is to increase the size of your desktop icons almost to the point of being ridiculously large, like 96x96. This way your desktop will "fill up" faster, forcing you to clear it more regularly.
Edit: the best part was running it a couple dozen times to get an entire flock walking, falling, and rolling all over your desktop, and watching everything grind to halt under CPU strain!
Aww memories. One of my old colleagues would mess with my computer and added a bunch of these. I left them there much to his chagrin. I got revenge as one night he was in the office late at night by my desktop, it was completely dark in the office and the sheep baa’d and it scared the crap out of him.
Oh wow! Not sure if it was this exact program, but I remember some similar sheep roaming my desktop when I was young. It had the ability to draw pictures in MS Paint, and would often do so when you were working on something...
It looks like this repo is is a rewrite of an earlier "scmpoo.exe" that roamed the internet in the mid-1990s. That was fun to set up on school computers to automatically launch at random times.
Apart from amusement, this served as a nice example when you are giving talks at universities trying to motivate students to tinker. Just multiple gravity by -1 and voila!
He mentions the old Dashboard ball widget. There was a glitch you could use to put widgets onto your desktop instead, so naturally every school Mac had 20 bouncy balls on it.
classic. we had the versions of OS X with keyboard shortcuts for global zoom and color invert. took a couple months for the faculty to learn about these shortcuts the hard way..
We'd print out the same string sans newlines and watch the console word wraparound make some shapes. All started from a bug someone wrote that we thought was funny.
I remember Docklings, a feature of early OSX that let devs put mini-apps in the Dock. I had one showing uptime, undoubtedly just piping the output from the CLI command. That was one of the early steps toward my interest in the CLI, which still wouldn’t be realized for a handful of years. This is a great throwback with more capability than those had. Very cool.
I’m genuinely interested to see whether we can throw a little ML at simulating dumb virtual desktop pets… we ought to have made some progress in the last two decades.
Agree. Remember those amazing fish screen savers back in the 90's. Those blew my mind. I have not seen any modern versions of that. Someone please take my money.
This might be how the Singularity comes about: Anthropic or OpenAI release a "Desktop companion" (a la "Clippy") ...
(Which somewhere deep in the EULA grants then rights to crawl your hard drives to train their models ...
... after all, with the coming "data starvation" our PCs might be the last frontier? Insane amounts of (varied) data and some free, distributed compute. What's not to like, from their perspective?
Edited: "CatGPT" will bring about the Singularity :)
> "It's inspired by Nate Heagy's widget for the OS X Dashboard"
Bring back the Dashboard, Apple! The original Dashboard was dropped because of it's shaky technology foundations, but the UX was fantastic and much better than the widgets buried in the notification centre or cluttering the desktop that we have today.
Now that we have modern native Widgets on macOS X, they need a place where they can thrive, and look cool, and be quickly accessible. Dashboard!
I remember having these kinds of desktop toys in Windows, way back when, probably 95 or 98? Just a little joyful thing you could play with. This rules.
I loved the one that would take a screenshot of your current desktop and you could smash it with a hammer and set it on fire. Little me had some anger issues
Linux never acted like Win9x cooperative multitasking and bsod, it was mostly just missing things outright or forced one to edit config files and use fdisk. Annoying perhaps but not rage inducing. The kind of blind rage that comes from losing your work for the third time today.
As cool and fun as this is, the OP is honestly one of my favorite developers. The app “Feeeed” on iOS is such a game-changer of an RSS reader, and any feedback I’ve had in the past, he’s responded promptly and respectfully. Glad to see this trending on HN.
A bug: The ball guesses the location with multiple monitors based on a finder window. If the dock and the Finder window are in separate displays, the ball does not work.
Reminds me of playing around with the WIMP on an Acorn Archimedes in about 1990, making a trivial app in BBC BASIC V that put a bouncing ball on the icon bar. Good times.
Now compare this with Apple's 90min multi million dollar bi-yearly recorded presentation where Tim Apple & friends lobotomize the credulous consumers...
Boring. There was/is a Linux dock which was main demo of a physics engine. We could toss icons which would bounce off screen corner and land in some part of the dock. You never know what order your icons are in.
Man, you must be fun at parties. Why do you need to put down the person who made a fun little project because it has been done in the past differently? It's a weird thing that we do in the tech community, I can't imagine people who knit to say the same kind of things.
