I keep making things out of checkboxes

The sheer simplicity of this idea - a 1-bit grid, which you can interact with in real-time - echoes that of Pico-8 [1], a fantasy console with strict limits such that you're not overwhelmed with ideas, but instead given bounds to play with. Its limits keep it realistic: you can do immensely wondrous things with the console, but its graphic and music style are limited, and as such it provides much more of an incentive to make a game - it's far less overwhelming, and you can concentrate on fun. But also, it offers a challenge! As you begin to hit the limits, you come up with clever tricks to save space, and because the computer isn't blisteringly fast, you're pushing yourself as much as you are the computer.

[1]: https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php

But this checkbox playground would be, in my eyes, an even better virtual console - reduced to the bare minimum of what you could make into a game that can be enjoyed. Provide a nice interface such that the user only has to write the game code, provide events to hook into - start(), frame() and click(x, y) - and this would be an immensely satisfying console to immediately get to work on, as rather than worry about graphics and audio, you're free to get right into making it fun.

...also, it'd be an excellent framework for teaching kids how to code! :D

This is a bit tangential, but I've been completely impressed by a ton of the Bad Apple "ports" to various platforms (particularly the Sega Genesis and the Atari 2600). It's amazing how the simple choice of making a mostly-binary music video has made a song popular in hacker culture.

I remember someone had made an early iPhone game out of UI elements (around 2009 ish?). I thought it was such a cool idea, and spent a bunch of time messing around with "ui-elements-as-graphics". My favourite thing I came up with was sine-wave scrollbars: https://www.mrspeaker.net/dev/sinescrollbars/

If you enjoy this kind of (ab)use of browser elements, I highly suggest the works of Matthew Rayfield: https://matthewrayfield.com/. Popup trombone is a work of art.

Try making Conway's Game of Life.

And with the ability to check/uncheck the boxes and influence the course of the simulation.

The best projects are when someone talented uses their considerable abilities on something really really pointless.

I just left this comment directly on the article:

I don't think you can really say you've exhaused this until you can run DOOM rendered with checkboxes. You might need to get into checkbox dithering with multiple checkboxes to give you a few different fill levels, and use really small checkboxes, so you get both the resolution and can actually see what you're shooting at.

I know: I'm a bastard.

Not sure why he's worried about not being marketable, he checks all the boxes.

In a similar undertaking, Inigo Quilez (of Shadertoy fame) once created an animation using the cells of a spreadsheet [0] as pixels.

[0] https://youtu.be/JnCkF62gkOY

The author might have fun with novation launchpads :D A 9x9 matrix of pressable, programmatically lightable RGB buttons

While intended for music production, people have used it for interactive lightshows or games

Unless I missed them, a bunch of the demos aren't linked directly in the page. Here's Bad Apple: https://www.bryanbraun.com/checkboxland/docs/demos/bad-apple...

It's a tick infestation.

Reminds me Rozin's mechanical mirrors.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kV8v2GKC8WA

I too keep making things out of checkboxes and radio buttons; increasingly my tool-like UIs are dominated by variations on the label/input CSS trick. Naturally, that is what I thought the article was about; but everything the author does can be done equally simplistically with canvas, webGL, divs, text; the demos are more about the parsing of the input than the display technique.

This strongly reminds me of The Glass Bead Game (Das Glasperlenspiel) by Herman Hesse[1]. The idea of simplifying and restricting the creative space into a grid, but then assigning abstract value to the grid (e.g. game of life, minesweeper) seems to be a persistent meme in computers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Glass_Bead_Game

In case the author sees this: when I click in the last row of the laser demo, the 'beam' never gets started---the box just sits there, checked.

I'm immediately seeing the possibility of turning checkboxes into registers and RAM and rolling out Knuth's MMIX from TAOCP[1]. I mean, if you're going nuts. . .

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Computer_Programm...

I feel like there needs to be a way to control system volume made out of e.g. a webcam checkbox filter.

If you could visualize a series of these getting smaller and smaller til the point they are indistinguishable from pixels, a la Powers of 10 video, it could be a really fun teaching / learning tool as to how far our modern displays have come.

This is very impressive, especially the video with 3d effect. Can we check the repos?

Did you use libraries or did you create a library for this?

I would love to see a slider as well, maybe with similar effects like transitions in PowerPoint.

Is this all Js rendered or does it use html and css?

If you're interested in this sort of thing, check out the TMDC or Text-Mode Demo Competition were it's the same idea but 80x50 text instead of textboxes. Hasn't really been run in a while, but it's a really fun exercise.

Adding colour would be a great way to waste even more time on this epic idea...

Neat!

Next step: Variable size checkboxes. Something you can't do with ordinary pixels.

next, adapt https://www.a1k0n.net/2011/07/20/donut-math.html

Ah this is just wonderful!

I love this kind of experimental noodling with no real purpose except fun.

I wonder what other form elements can be pushed into weird usages?

I'd guess radio buttons and select boxes with ASCII in could be next.

Finally something useful!

where's Conway's game of life? :)

serious question: what is the performance of using checkboxes compared to other methods of rendering in a browser?

Rgb checkboxes?

Why checkboxes though? There are perfectly good ordinary pixels to do all this with.

Is there a CSS file I can drop in to change them to radio buttons somehow?

can confirm, website checks out.. sorry the pun was right there. i had to check it off my list.. i won’t go any further with this, or else i’ll have to get checked into a facility.. ok i am done.

This was cool. Definitely going to use it somewhere.

Make things out of Checkboxes... check!

But where is checkers!

This is so funny!

WoW :D Amazing!

Awesome

This may be like one of those great 19th century discoveries in math and physics for which there were no real-world use cases at the time, but were applied decades later with world-changing consequences.

Some day, Apple logo made out of nothing but checkboxes might just save the world.