Octos – HTML live wallpaper engine | Hacker News Reader

Octos – HTML live wallpaper engine

github.com

156 pointsunderpig140 comments

It’s like it’s 1997 with IE4 and DHTML again!

Wallpaper choice was a big thing 25 years ago. You could run 2 or 3 programs at the same time, but 16M of ram didn’t go that far, so I guess I returned to the desktop quite a lot.

Some habits persist, I still have xplanet on mine. I go weeks without seeing it.

Best of times DHTML was fun, doing Flash things without Flash :D

Thanks for reminding me: you could actually set a webpage as the desktop wallpaper in old versions of Windows (XP and before). I used to have a cool animated wallpaper before it was cool.

I made an html page that used frames to load whatsup and other monitoring tools as my background

Win95's ActiveDesktop was pretty cool. But only for a while. Same here I'd bet.

Interestingly, this reminds me I have not seen the Desktop of my Mac in several years I think. I use spotlight, the dock and favorite places to move around. Plus a tabbed full screen view of several current folders. The Desktop should be behind all that, I assume ;)

I see my desktop at least weekly, but only because I shut down my computer on the weekends I’m not on call. I can’t remember the last time I used it to open anything, regardless of the OS. I use the taskbar/dock, and the start menu/search function to open via the GUI. Otherwise, everything opens from the CLI.

Right. I have mission control set up to one hot corner for when I want to switch between windows lazily with just one hand (mouse) and making out parts of my wallpaper underneath the scattered windows is the extent I see it.

I'm the exact opposite. Unless I'm watching a video, I'm usually not full screen. I keep my windows either side by side or centered with the desktop being visible on both sides. I absolutely hate it when apps like browsers, VS-Code-without-split-view-active or Slack are stretched the full width of 5120.

How often do most people see the desktop during a session? To me is when turning on the computer, just before before mail chat and browser open. After that I just switch between apps.

What I'm currently doing instead of a live wallpaper, is that I have a firefox plugin that on opening a new tab without url, shows me a site with status on things that matter to me.

I do, often. I keep my new tab page in all browsers blank for speed and minimal distraction, regularly hide all background apps (cmd-opt-H on Mac), close windows I'm not going to use for a while (especially anything that could have unsaved state), and use the set of items on my desktop as shortcuts into my key workflows.

My workflow is always closing everything when I’m done with one segment of work (a bug is fixed, a commit polished, an email replied, the day has come to an end, etc.), and take a big stretch after getting out of the chair.

So, I see my wallpaper quite a bit; though I don’t notice it much any more.

I see it often. I plug my Mac laptop to 2 screens and usually one screen won't have any windows until I move something over manually.

I have something that rotates my desktop wallpaper daily so it's fun to see a random wallpaper pop up.

I have been working on a project with some similarities, an X window manager written in Electron. It uses browser windows for wallpapers as well as frame windows. Haven't gotten the API where I want it to be yet, but I use it daily.

https://github.com/wnayes/electron-wm

Very nice!

Since I saw one of the Ascii Art styled ones:

If anyone is interested in more Animated Ascii Art, I created an interactive tool to generate it recently: https://www.gifcii.fun

Awesome <3. Takes me back to running compiz on slackware in the early 2000s. Era of the blinged out desktop.

Compiz still rocks it

I'm using Lively Wallpaper[0] to show an audio visualizer (trough CefSharp). The CPU load as shown in Task Manager is around 1.5-2% on my Ryzen 5800X. Therefore I tend to activate it only when I actually play some music and have it show.

[0] https://github.com/rocksdanister/lively

My experience running Google trends[0] is similar, but I had occasional spikes. I wonder if this is better.

[0]: https://trends.google.com/trends/hottrends/visualize

My Avast virus scanner doesn't like it..

A more important question is why do you like Avast?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22159385

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36728825

That second link seems to have some issues with credibility.

And if you think Antivirus Software selling users' browser data is a poopy thing to do, you should take a look at what Cell Phone Carriers do with your phone's data.

Have any references?

References to what?

> second link being a non-credible source

- Website is called "security detectives" which is an affiliate-link blog

- Article leads with the paragraph `Avast and AVG no longer pose a threat to user privacy, meaning both products are 100% safe to use.`

> wireless carriers selling customer data

- https://www.govtech.com/network/wireless-carriers-face-200m-...

- https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-cell-carriers-selling-acces...

- https://medium.com/@philipn/want-to-see-something-crazy-open...

This is cool though it contributes to the saturated "let's ship our own browser" space. I need a separate browser to play music, to play games, to communicate with people, to browse the web, and now to run a wallpaper. If only we had a way to use a single browser instance that is utilized by all of these. That's kind of been the selling point of the web all this time - write once and run almost everywhere. You shouldn't need to ship your own browser, though I understand we don't have that kind of capability standardized yet.

Check out https://tauri.app/ - specifically, https://github.com/tauri-apps/wry, which provides a cross-platform interface to the system's WebView.

I find that the larger the monitor I have the more I appreciate windowed apps (vs. fullscreen) and as a result wallpaper choice makes more of a difference.

I currently use Wallpaper Engine, will have to give Octos a try.

I had an idea for a similar project (1) a few years back, but abandoned it after reaching the state where I had a node module to attach an Electron window to the wallpaper in Windows.

Fun to see a project that has reached further, remember how cool I used to think dashboards/widgets for the PC stats were when I was younger.

(1): https://github.com/robinwassen/electron-wallpaper

Active Desktop resurrected. Nice.

Nice.

Relatedly, I always found it deeply odd that there wasn't a widely popular "Conky" alternative that just used HTML/CSS/JS?

Never figured out why not? Overhead?

Amazing! What is the system usage of this?

Negligent since this is made for Windows which already wastes most of resources

It's an electron app, so I guess at least 1GB of RAM.

I remember having activedesktop in windows 98… everything old is new again lol

Yep. Even office is trying to bring back the Office 97 shortcut bar. Winamp is releasing a new version.

This looks pretty neat! Reminds me of the early 2000s when everyone around me was messing around with rainmeter (Which I believe is still around) but this seems like it might be much more accessible.

Active desktop, but with 100x the cpu and memory requirements.

OK: I want an animated wallpaper of desktop windows, with the windows moving from time to time. It's good to be distracted from the useful parts of your computer.

What is the start bar / shell mod in these examples? Or is this part of Octos? Looks really nice.

looks interesting but i spend so little time watching my desktop actually...

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