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Ball: A ball that lives in your dock

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Re: Ball: A ball that lives in your dock

#221

Post by wruza »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #100
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone has a hate boner for Windows.

Everyone did around the VXD/BSOD era. Remember these? https://tenor.com/search/man-smashes-computer-gifs

I remember Red Hat 5 being not that great or usable either.

Re: Ball: A ball that lives in your dock

#222

Post by Gormo »

praseodym wrote: post #121
hnlmorg wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a few programs like this. The earliest one I recall was Neko https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neko_(software) 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 play…

Bonzi Buddy was widely classified as spyware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy 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.

Yes, Bonzi Buddy was spyware. It's not that what they were doing was OK, but rather that the industry has normalized spyware.

Re: Ball: A ball that lives in your dock

#223

Post by mb2100 »

jb1991 wrote: post #201

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.

when ours was down, we found clicking the ball helped... it immediately bounced up again.

Re: Ball: A ball that lives in your dock

#224

Post by Bluestein »

mb2100 wrote: post #223
jb1991 wrote: post #201

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.

when ours was down, we found clicking the ball helped... it immediately bounced up again.

We find a soft re-bounce helps.-

Re: Ball: A ball that lives in your dock

#225

Post by red-iron-pine »

weberer wrote: post #185
albert_e wrote: post #123

I want widgets on Windows desktop as well. 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 U…

Sounds like you want Linux.

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

Re: Ball: A ball that lives in your dock

#227

Post by toddmorey »

jb1991 wrote: post #201

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.

This has been a complete show stopper for my organization: https://github.com/nate-parrott/ball/issues/10

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.

Re: Ball: A ball that lives in your dock

#228

Post by rc_mob »

rkagerer wrote: post #23
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #6

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. https://web.archive.org/web/20110301011442/http://gogoredbal...

I miss websites that actually gave you useful information on the landing page.

"smallweb" has been posted on hn in the past if you want to look it up
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