Show HN: Parallax wallpaper engine for Linux and Windows | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Parallax wallpaper engine for Linux and Windows

github.com

225 pointsCzikenix65 comments

This is exactly the sort of fun, random, small project that reminds me of the more anarchic and playful older days of computing and the web. Those days are gone and not coming back, but their spirit lives on in things like this.

It’s not some earth shattering YCombinator thing, it’s not a SaaS, it’s not (at least to my eye) about money — it’s a neat thing to do with a piece of screen real estate we all look at a million times a day. Not to be melodramatic but the world needs a lot more “heh, neat”.

Those days are still very much here, there is just a lot more noise from the opposite end of the computing world.

It's a long way around but I think/believe we'll have some general purpose computing/systems research wins, that start to expose some computing as fun, interesting, casual, and from there we'll see a budding "heh, neat" attitude.

The atmosphere around computing had gotten hypersaturated by the intense capital flows & software heavy-industries that have built up. Serving the industrial need has been an overehelming priority. And it's really outshadowed much of the fart around & make fun stuff element that made it a scene of interest for so long.

I continue to tend to believe there's a ton of looming change in what computing will be when it grows up more. While most of that work gets concentrated in refinement & iteration & support of heavy-industrial software, we also keep finding/stumbling on stupendously more straightforward ways of doing things (react components/vdom, then hoc, then hooks). The ability of very small ideas to more capably express computing has enormous implications.

The web is interesting here because the page is a bit of a canvas, resculptable by anyone knowing a little introductory javascript+html+css. Whatever innovation computing has, ultimately most of it strongly contrasts, is esoteric, no matter how useful it could be. Almost all the work is sent through an extremely small funnel where a handful of people are at all familiar with the system. For bigger libraries, it might be hundreds. It's bad that most works are obscure & inaccessible, but worse, most software being opaque means rven though it's everywhere around us, we never can learn it. The world is obscure, it's mechanism happening at nanoscale levels we cant get to & which are still down-compiled assembly codes with most of the meaning wiped away.

Computing needs a kick towards extropic ends. Creativity will re-emerge, but only if there's an exosystem or ecosystem of computing, and right now we are small isolated islands, producing appliances, fixed systems, not computing software. Somewhere computing has to start letting users back in.

Not so early internet but what happened to over the top Compiz 3D cube desktops and wobbly windows that catch on fire when closed?

Some of it is still there.

3D Cube: https://github.com/Schneegans/Desktop-Cube

Burning Windows: https://github.com/Schneegans/Burn-My-Windows

Wayfire is like compiz but as an independent Wayland compositor: https://wayfire.org/

There used to be a great rotating cube animation in OS X when you locked the screen or switched users with fast user switching. It was especially impressive on the 24" iMac screen (I remember being delayed going to lunch one day because everyone in the office wanted to see it in action).

A couple months ago I loaded compiz on my Debian box. I messed with a lot of the eye candy, then settled into a few fun gee-gaws, like switching virtual desktops via rotating cube, windows that desaturate when not focused, etc and still am using it today. Puts a little whimsy back into my work day.

Older ThinkPads had accelerometers in them to detect when the machine had been dropped and park the disk heads in the instant before it hit the floor hard to avoid data destruction. A Linux driver was written for this accelerometer, and someone had configured Compiz to shift to the virtual desktop immediately to the left or right, depending on which side the laptop had been smacked.

Now that's hack value.

Rotating cube desktops are such good UI/UX I wish they were more mainstream... it really helps compartmentalizing tasks into different virtual/mental spaces

There was one screensaver that would make your cube slowly rotate while all your windows (still displaying live content, mind you) would swirl around on the inside like papers caught in a small tornado.

I remember this kind of purely for fun desktop stuff was all over Windows 3.1 and 95. There'd be shareware apps with no purpose other than making bullet holes appear randomly on your screen, or snow flakes fall everywhere. It was wacky and fun vs. the all serious business that operating systems have become today.

Also interesting is the fact that such software was perfectly capable of rendering those effects with decent performance on hardware of the time --- single core CPUs with a few hundred MHz, barely anything resembling a GPU, and memory usage in the low MBs if not kilobytes. Now even the completely bland and boring, mostly borderless UI of an IM application is ridiculously sluggish on a high-end multicore machine with a "gamer"-class GPU and takes insane amounts of RAM.

I had the MST3K "creeping error" program that put the guys on screen like when they were watching a movie. They'd randomly make a comment or move. It was pretty fun,and totally useless.

xroach says hello. https://software.opensuse.org/package/xroach

Oh! And XSnow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xsnow

Or the old desktop extensions of the early Mac days like talking moose or the one that, when you emptied the trash, had Oscar the Grouch pop out of the trashcan icon and sing, "I love trash"

You need to use the Wii remote in reverse so you can make a fake window.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw

(can't believe this was 15 years ago now..)

This is brilliant!

Why haven't we seen this idea developed further into consumer devices by now

Without any accompanying pair of glasses the parallax effect is only convincing for a single viewer.

How often do you really have more than one viewer per screen?

Amazon's failed Android phone infamously had this feature. There was a front facing IR camera IIRC which tracked your face/gaze and made the environment change as you looked into it. https://venturebeat.com/games/how-3d-works-on-the-amazon-fir...

I remember him, Johnny Lee. I actually bought his Poor man's stabilizer ~15 years ago because I couldn't afford to buy Steadicam. EDIT: He also worked as dev for XBox Kinect

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Lee_(computer_scientist...

XBox Kinect had so much potential but sadly smart phones appeared to eat up the entire market. Even ARKit hasn't really done much. VR just doesn't seem to be much of a market except for things like VRChat.

Fake Windows can be made with OpenCV face tracking and webcam as well!

I don't know if you're interested in monetizing this, but Wallpaper Engine on Steam is really popular (>500k reviews, 75k concurrent users). There's definitely a market for this type of product if you can find a way to differentiate yourself and crack the gtm strategy. eg seems like the wallpaper engine doesn't support linux yet, which may be your early wedge. Good luck!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/431960/Wallpaper_Engine/

Thanks for Your advise! It sounds really interesting, I have to think about it

I could see adding a nice GUI app for uploading/managing layers, editing the config, etc making waves on Steam.

Believe it or not, Wallpaper Engine apparently works through Proton and a KDE plugin:

https://www.protondb.com/app/431960

Could something like this be built for macOS too? I remember there used to be a Quartz plugin you could use to have a screensaver as a background so you could get animated backgrounds, but something like this would be fun to have. The issue with the screensaver as a desktop background if I recall was rapid battery drain: what kind of resources are required to use this one?

I'm sure it can be done and I'm going to do some research about it in the near future. I would like to make it available on macOS too

presumably https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coregraphics/cgwin...

This looks cool! Congrats on releasing.

The Linux installation steps look a bit funky to me: Downloading a zip file from the internet and unzipping directly to "/".

It's not very different from piping curl output to bash.

Thanks! I think most Linux users probably build it using make, although I decided to add a compiled zip anyway

I have a script on a webserver that generates a "wallpaper of the day" based on the date - it could be adapted rather easily to create separate layers.

Feel free to check it out, reload for a slightly different one: https://www.theresno.cloud/gen/wpotd.py

Colors do a full rainbow over 365 days, the number of layers represents passed months this year...

One thing that would probably make this adoption fodder for the custom Arch Linux & r/LinuxPorn communities is if it were just a desktop that side scrolled with parallax. Those folks seem to strongly reward anything even remotely 8-bit. I get that drops the mouse-driven parallax, just an idea.

what's wrong with both?

Absolutely nothing

If only I was using a "wallpaper". With dark mode on, even a dark grey wallpaper emits enough brightness to make things distracting for me e.g. when watching movies on the main monitor while the other monitors don't have anything on them. Nowadays my wallpaper is a jet black Image.

@czikenix: first thing I went for was checking the AUR for this by searching for `lwp`; the name exists in AUR as a "Lightweight process library"; names are hard so good luck if you end up re-naming it <g>.

will get to testing it out soon and looking forward to it

It looks like I have to change the name before uploading to AUR :/

This is really fun!

Can you make the default wallpaper higher-res? Specifically 5120x1440 -- or even double those sizes for hi-dpi displays.

Right now I'm looking at some very pixelated art. But I love the default wallpaper!

This is fun, but I wonder how to remove it again? If I just select another wallpaper it instantly overwrites it again with your parallax wallpaper. Fun lil project tho!

Cool thanks for sharing

This is very cool! How does this work internally?

On Linux it takes a handle to the RootWindow and starts drawing on it, but if You are using a compositor it creates a new window with parameters similar to RootWindow. On Windows it works similar to the second case

Really cool and super neat! Well done OP!

Thanks! ;D

Neat - gonna try this when I get home!

I like neat and compact projects!!!

Super neat. Congratulations, OP.

Nice idea, I really like it.

Thank You!

Does this work on wayland?

Unfortunately no, but I'm going to make it work on wayland too at some point

Starred the repo so I can follow wayland progress. What a fun project!

it'd be neat if you could make it automatically scroll.

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