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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

#241

Post by Bluestein »

toddmorey wrote: post #238
adamors wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can’t tell if this is satire. Have you tried submitting a patch?

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 doi…

> More devs need to be good to OSS maintainers.

Good point. (They are two and different things ...)

> Breaks my heart when I see folks treat public repos and GH issues as a service desk and not a collaboration!

This is also well said, and on point.-

Re: Ball: A ball that lives in your dock

#242

Post by marcosdumay »

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…

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.)

Re: Ball: A ball that lives in your dock

#244

Post by greenpresident »

Bluestein wrote: post #240
yakito wrote: post #239

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.

Heavy command line user, eh?

Not OP but for everyone I know the desktop is mostly either empty or a messy “temp” folder.

Re: Ball: A ball that lives in your dock

#245

Post by Bluestein »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #63
amethyst wrote: post #24

I still miss my desktop sheep every once in a while: https://github.com/Adrianotiger/desktopPet?tab=readme-ov-fil... 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!

I was a big fan of VirtuaGirl myself. (NSFW if you Google about it).

Incredibly enough, the "VirtualGirl" executable is archived at the Internet Archive:

- https://archive.org/details/virtuagirl265

It has been found worthy of preservation.-

Re: Ball: A ball that lives in your dock

#247

Post by marionauta »

Bluestein wrote: post #240
yakito wrote: post #239

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.

Heavy command line user, eh?

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.

Re: Ball: A ball that lives in your dock

#248

Post by colkassad »

pomian wrote: post #107

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, o…

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.

Re: Ball: A ball that lives in your dock

#249

Post by concurrentsquar »

toddmorey wrote: post #227
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.

My team can't even evaluate Ball (as a tool for physical simulation of spherical cow-like objects): https://github.com/nate-parrott/ball/issues/9

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.

Re: Ball: A ball that lives in your dock

#250

Post by jameshart »

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…

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.

So we can’t have nice things, sorry.

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