I don't know what's the use case, but it like it already
(Somebody upthread is using it in production for spherical-cow simulation :) /s
Ball: A ball that lives in your dock
261–270 of 305 posts
Re: Ball: A ball that lives in your dock
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Instead what I have is ads. > And copilot everywhere. 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 impossi…
> 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.)
Re: Ball: A ball that lives in your dock
#263This desperately needs a hoop or a bin to aim for, then it's golden.
Re: Ball: A ball that lives in your dock
#264I guess the duty of mentioning Neko befell on me this time: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neko_(software)
(I am convinced the Singularity will come in the form of a cute, harmless, screenmate AI, if not Neko itself ...)
Re: Ball: A ball that lives in your dock
#265This is awesomely reminiscent of the old school 68k macintosh era - dogcow, oscar the grouch in the trash can, etc I miss that simplicity / playfulness / aesthic of that era (yes I am old, please get off my lawn)
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.
Re: Ball: A ball that lives in your dock
#266I like this, it reminds me of xeyes and similar early UI toys.
I thought I remembered their being a ball; was the package xtoys?
Re: Ball: A ball that lives in your dock
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Re: Ball: A ball that lives in your dock
#268I 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 added this to my website a while ago. You can open a terminal and summon as many as your computer can handle with something like `sheep 100`. https://dustinbrett.com/
The right click menu on the site is quite the trick. It took me way too long to figure out it wasn't the native Firefox menu.
Re: Ball: A ball that lives in your dock
#269We’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.
It needs write-ahead logging and better transaction isolation before it can be taken seriously for high transaction volume environments. Neat concept, though.
Re: Ball: A ball that lives in your dock
#270As 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.