Ball: A ball that lives in your dock | Hacker News Reader

Ball: A ball that lives in your dock

github.com

1,017 pointsBluestein292 comments

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.

what have you been using it for?

Can’t speak for parent but we’ve been using it for our standard red ball use cases.

The physics can seem a bit floaty, particularly with space or moonscape wallpapers, but overall it’s good.

Totally mission critical.-

when ours was down, we found clicking the ball helped... it immediately bounced up again.

We find a soft re-bounce helps.-

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.

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

I can't tell if THIS is satire...

Everything is satire, if you're not the one on call.

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 doing that for this fun project, but a message I'll use any excuse to promote. Btw... that issue filed was I think someone genuinely helping the project.)

> 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.-

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.

All common issues! Particularly the cost spikes without a reasonable explanation. Also, the lack of NT support the issue you point to shows could be a problem. Ball runs fine on "M" Apple chips, however :)

It's embarrassing that we don't have NT support already. I have many users of NT on Alpha and MIPS who need Ball for critical services. Here's a convenient patch with a bunch of garbled test cases. Merge that in.

(I'm totally not a state actor looking to socially engineer you to hide an exploit, by the way.)

Of course. Were you state, there's a Chinese CDN we can totally recommend to cut latency on this.-

(Totally :)

any update on this?

None whatsoever.-

PS Still in work, as per the issue tracker :/ :)

It needs write-ahead logging and better transaction isolation before it can be taken seriously for high transaction volume environments. Neat concept, though.

We initially had this issue as well. So we put a small team of developers to work on the problem and were able to implement our own version of the metastore that supported optimistic concurrency and hidden partitioning. It has significantly improved reliability in stress tests (variable velocity ball bouncing in a hyper-dimensional click-cube environment). however, the larger size of our object store is increasing our monthly S3 costs.

> however, the larger size of our object store is increasing our monthly S3 costs.

Classic, am affraid.-

Tried R2?

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, out to the right (eg), then you would hear her walking, and eventually she would show up on your left of the screen. Fun little thing with no particular purpose.

There was a few programs like this. The earliest one I recall was Neko https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neko_(software)

But I think there were sheep, dancing babies (ugh!!), something like Bonzi Buddy rings a bell (I once had to clean something named that off a colleague’s workstation when he reported it thinking it was malware).

There was also toys like this on Linux and Unix too. Most famously xeyes.

I miss the playful era when things like this and novelty screensavers were “cool”.

Bonzi Buddy was widely classified as spyware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy

But if you read the description of its spyware behaviour from a current perspective, it's not that different from the telemetry that’s implemented everywhere and Windows bugging you to use Bing as a search engine.

Was wild reading the talk page for that and seeing Jimbo Wales weighing in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:BonziBuddy

Yes, Bonzi Buddy was spyware. It's not that what they were doing was OK, but rather that the industry has normalized spyware.

I wish wikipedia would detect when you're accessing from a non-mobile device and automatically redirect you to non-mobile wikipedia

Seconded.-

(Then again, some people like the mobile version better - kind of like a "reader mode" - and link to it because of that ...

The behavior you mention should be an user configurable setting, perhaps ...

Sounds like a simple user script, found one after some searching: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/401345-force-redirect-mobi...

Ooh I remember eSheep!

There was also this desktop program where you would choose from different weapons, I don't remember for which purpose... anyone knows what I'm talking about?

I know it as "stressr.exe" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6NKouWa_o0

I remember having the computer ground to a halt, basically, with sheep all over. It looked like a rural road crossing :)

On X11 systems there were also things like xsnow, with snow piling up on your window borders and santa flying in the background. xlemmings, walking/falling on your windows and various variations on this. Xeyes is the 'biggest' or most famous one, but in early linux distro's there were various of these things in the 'games' sections.

Xeyes (and Xclock) FTW ...

Was going to say that!

I should still have a screenshot somewhere of lesstif/mwm with xsnow + xeyes (and xclock of course)

xroach - little cockroaches that would hide under your windows. When you closed a window, they would scurry around to hide under other windows.

Small story, friend of mine had a malware package, it needed a backdoor installed; he had a tool to merge the backdoor with any other application, so he used a cute desktop sheep thing. I put it on my parents' computer, then could have the client on my side instruct it to take and send screenshots.

We also set it up at school (IT degree) on the shared computers, but I think a sysadmin found out. We didn't get in trouble, but a classmate was caught and nearly expelled.

We have all done stuff like that :)

Don't forget Tiny Elvis.

https://archive.org/details/win3_TELV150

I ran something called Dogz [1] which was a pretty advanced dog simulator. You could train the dog to perform tricks or punish it if it did something you didn't like. They claimed to use AI and it worked very well although I don't know how much much was placebo. In any case, I remember it as being well ahead of its time.

[1] https://youtu.be/8eqLzcvVpiM

I had both Catz and Dogz but I don’t recall them ever interacting with the desktop.

Fun toy though. Kind of like a tamagotchi.

> tamagotchi

Tamagotchi. Now that's nostalgia for you.-

You could bring them out of the "pen" and then they'd run around on your desktop.

Ooh, Neko was 1989 - I'm not sure when I first saw the Lunar-Lander game on the Amiga that had a similar mechanism, but it would have been around then.

Gravity vs thrust, with left + right controls, the idea was to carefully land on any of the windows on your desktop.

Analogous to breaking the fourth wall, in a way.

I still recall the scrolling message in that game -- Space is big, Space is dark, It's hard to find, a place to park.

> Space is big, Space is dark, It's hard to find, a place to park.

This needs to be on a Tshirt.-

(Sent to Musk. For the reusable rocket team :)

There was also an application that took a screenshot of your current desktop and then gave you a bunch of weapons - bats, guns, bombs - and allowed you to smash it to pieces.

That was nice sometimes.

Desktop Toys

XRoach was a favourite to run on someone who left their machine unlocked (or their XServer display unprotected) - it makes cockroaches that hide underneath windows, so you only see them when you move or close a window. Then they all scuttled around and hid under other ones!

Reminds me of: https://infosec.exchange/@paco/110772422266480371

For the nostalgic... https://github.com/glreno/oneko

packaged for debian :)

The sheep/ram was my favorite. Purple horns

You will love and hate Desktop Goose

Peace was never an option.

I miss screensavers. Damn opinionated Gnome

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.

Would love to have an AI character on my desktop that would flip me shit for having clutter and ask if they can ‘clean up around here’ and carry files into folders

Anyone remember the Nike one? Where you could shoot a football into the desktop and it would burn it, or the player could slide and it would tear the picture

This 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)

If you’re still on a recent macOS, check out the page setup dialog in any app with printing.

(She’s still there, doing flips and precision bitmap alignment)

Wow, I had to check a lot more apps before I found one that used the standard page setup. I eventually relented and opened Pages — for anyone who wishes to bypass all that hunting around!

Actual flips? If so, that's an easter egg I didn't manage to trigger.

I wrote a Norton-style drive activity monitor, if that’s the kind of thing you like - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/drivelight/id6446650999

One of my first memories is of my dad showing me how Oscar the Grouch was in his Mac trash can, and sang, “I love trash!” when he put something in there. Haven’t thought of that in many years, but it was the first thing I thought of when I saw this.

I vaguely recall a LiteStep theme for Windows back in the day that did something like this -- hadn't heard of it as a Mac feature before!

Talking Moose!

Talking Moose, Kaleidoscope, Kilroy. So much fun and made your OS so unstable.

First rule of troubleshooting was always “turn off all extensions.” :)

Which is why now they are being migrated, one after the other, into userspace. :)

That is also an era filled with exploration and iteration. Althought we still explore a lot nowadays, but the vibe is quite different.

(I am afraid AIs will do most of the "exploration" for us, this days, sadly ...

... while we gladly just "prompt" - which, in itself, might be an exporatory technique. We'll see.-

The Energizer Bunny too. You could install it on a lab full of machines, trigger it, and it would march from one to another, banging a drum the whole time.

Oscar! Thank you for the trip down the memory lane.

yes! I loved all the weird and funny easter eggs hidden in the OS. Magical time.

Thanks for the memory of oscar rising up singing I...love...trash!

(hello, fellow old!)

Even well into the PPC era Classic Mac OS carried that culture of fun third party software. Can't remember its name, but for example in the late 90s/early 00s I ran across an extension that gave dragged icons gravity and momentum, allowing the user to "throw" them around their desktop. No practical purpose, just fun.

Arguably the Kaleidoscope fits into this category too. While there were tame themes for it that did more tame things like make your Mac look like Windows/BeOS/NeXTSTEP/etc, many third party Kaleidoscope schemes skewed more whacky and fun than your average theme software. Ever wanted your desktop to look like a pair of jeans[0], a dwarven forge[1], 2D top-down space shooter[2], or cute cartoon jungle[3]? Kaleidoscope has you covered.

[0]: https://i.ibb.co/x1YsFqt/denim-scheme-dtdenimsit-vbpf.png [1]: https://i.ibb.co/fdXKKV2/eritis-forge-2-eitrisforge2sit-p5vq... [2]: https://i.ibb.co/TryF6VQ/boilerplatetm-boilerplatesit-vrao.p... [3]: https://i.ibb.co/cCLYpKL/monkeyparadise-monkeyparadisesit-ss...

> Even well into the PPC era Classic Mac OS carried that culture of fun third party software.

Apple knew it lived and died by third party developer adoption.-

(Now is all "app stores", walled gardens and "where is our 30%", first and foremost ...)

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.

You very well could be right. On a "systemic" sense, in order to devote effort to these whimsical things, you needed stability "everywhere else" ...

I still wish Sesame Street would let me write a modern version of The Grouch. -Eric Shapiro

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 UX ideas if Windows customization and widgets ecosystem was alive and thriving.

Widgets has existed natively on Windows since Vista. Unless you have disabled it from your taskbar settings, it's the icon next to your start menu.

You mean the tabloid news panel? I know it’s called widgets but it’s actually a tabloid news panel. I have no idea why MS thinks people need tabloid news inside their OS but alas. You can’t turn off the tabloid news without turning off the entire panel, ergo effectively Windows doesn’t have widgets.

https://www.rainmeter.net/

This. Its been around for over a decade and has all the features mentioned.

Another classic. An entire "subculture" ...

PS. Also see WindowBlinds, mentioned downthread ...

At some point these existed. I'm not sure, maybe on Windows 7?

But they were really sluggish, which made them useless in my opinion. If I have to wait seconds for my widgets to load or react, I'll just write my notes in notepad++ and look at the clock on the taskbar.

It was Vista iirc, and had to be disabled/removed immediately to make it even halfway useable.

It was Vista!! I remember the cpu, ram and fan speed all goes 100% when hovering on one.

> 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 impossible.

As soon as all the computers went online, the frivolity had to stop.

> 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.)

totally reminded me of the days with Windows Blind(?) some crazy dock... you could customise widgets showing bandwidth/disk io/ram/cpu the usual. man those were FUN. but possibly quite power hungry so wouldn't fly nowadays...

WindowBlinds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tmo62QTMn_I

Though you are probably thinking about rainmeter: https://www.rainmeter.net/

I have all I need right on my desktop. Expedia deals? Check. Candy Crush? Check. The current weather on the other side of the world using units I don't understand? Check. Everything came pre-installed too, so it's just the out of the box apple experience.

Enshitification ensues.

I'm not sure what you've done to your macOS install, but mine is also an out of the box Apple experience and I have none of that.

(I see what you did there :)

That sounds like you are on windows

> I want widgets on Windows desktop

> Instead what I have is ads

laughs in kde

Vista was bloated for its time, but man those widgets it had were so fun. Clock, dual car-like speedometers for CPU and RAM, calendar, weather, stocks, sticky notes. Luckily Android copied the idea soon after.

Windows used to be cool! As a kid I remember the Dangerous Creatures CD [1] came with a custom theme for Windows 95. It would change all the icons to cool animal stuff. The "My Computer" icon would change to a frog, the Recycle bin icon would change to a fish, and my favorite, the waiting icon for the mouse cursor would change to a Wasp!

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

Power Toys! It was the age of the Weezer video on the Windows 95 CD. Whole different attitude ...

Sounds like you want Linux.

aye, at this point desktop linux is pretty dang mature, and doesn't stream telemetry or error codes unless you explicitly tell it to.

the holdout was gaming, but Steam and Proton work practically flawlessly. one or two other occasional challenges -- a big one was MS Access that was needed for Master's program -- but other than that nothing on Windows that can't ignored / discarded

There was a very good one, I think back in 2005 - 2007 as part of Google Desktop / Google Desktop Search.

That was back when Google was a respectable company that in addition to the mandatory EULA had a separate notice that informed very very cleary, something like:

  READ THIS CAREFULLY

  THIS IS NOT THE NORMAL YADDA YADDA

... and then a relatively description of what they were going to to and not.

It had an amazing RSS feed reader widget that would automagically subscribe to feeds from pages on sites I visited and present a relevant selection of links.

(I too remember that Google. The "Don't be evil" Google).-

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.)

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.

Fwiw, here is the old Dashboard widget this is based on, for anyone else on an OS old enough to run it. It was a little annoying to dig out of the internet archive.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110301011442/http://gogoredbal...

I miss websites that actually gave you useful information on the landing page.

"smallweb" has been posted on hn in the past if you want to look it up

I guess the duty of mentioning Neko befell on me this time:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neko_(software)

Serendipity, I just mentioned neko a few days ago. It's even the last comment I made before making this one now:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40756670

It's been a _really_ long time since I've seen that cat. Thanks for the memories.

(I am convinced the Singularity will come in the form of a cute, harmless, screenmate AI, if not Neko itself ...)

I don't have any hard proof but you can ask my wife, a few years ago I totally called that bonzibuddy was gonna come back in style. We're almost there

Bonzibuddy, but with AI.

BonzAI Buddy

I'm surprised no one has brought back the desktop stripper yet.

Now with state of the art GFE AI!

Does it work like paint stripper?

My dad was so angry when I installed this on the family Packard Bell

If I knew how, I would 100% make a native app that simulates Clippy but is my daily interface with ChatGPT.

Looks like it already exists: https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9nwk37s35v5t

How about snippy? https://www.timdbg.com/posts/snippy-assistant-with-eyes/

For some reason, snippy looks terrifying lol

lol, that's a good design goal

Perhaps ask Claude AI to help you with that? :)

clippy > bonzi buddy

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.

Totally. There's absolutely no in-between.-

I treat my desktop as a temp dir and manually empty it every few days.

A desktop hygiene tip I read years ago (but can't remember where) is to increase the size of your desktop icons almost to the point of being ridiculously large, like 96x96. This way your desktop will "fill up" faster, forcing you to clear it more regularly.

(*Me fails at the "empty it every few days" stage ...)

I use it as a Downloads folder.

I always know where my recently downloaded files are, and I have visual feedback of when I should delete them.

I also use it as a temporary launchpad for sorting uploads.

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.

Also me but on Windows 10. I only see the wall paper just after I've booted the machine and within a few seconds at least one window is maximised (typically a tabbed browser), started from the task bar. alt+tab after that

Serious, I cannot be the only one with a default black, color-only Desktop background since Win95? :)

> It's a ball. It's fun. It's a ball.

All that's missing is about 3 more README's of warnings and disclosures ending with "Do not taunt Ball." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmqeZl8OI2M

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!

It looks like this repo is is a rewrite of an earlier "scmpoo.exe" that roamed the internet in the mid-1990s. That was fun to set up on school computers to automatically launch at random times.

That's the one I had. I got it from my friend in sixth grade, and who knows where he got it from!

Oh wow! Not sure if it was this exact program, but I remember some similar sheep roaming my desktop when I was young. It had the ability to draw pictures in MS Paint, and would often do so when you were working on something...

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

You’re getting downvoted but it really was pretty fantastic.

I had to admit it was also my first thought. The sprite was very very well done, actually ...

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

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

It has been found worthy of preservation.-

Aww memories. One of my old colleagues would mess with my computer and added a bunch of these. I left them there much to his chagrin. I got revenge as one night he was in the office late at night by my desktop, it was completely dark in the office and the sheep baa’d and it scared the crap out of him.

Haha thank you! This was my first thought too!

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/

quite cool. how did you make that website ?

https://github.com/DustinBrett/daedalOS

this is so sick

very cool website! I did sheep 4000 and my pc immediately exploded

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.

(Also, among other things, all the posts are "editable" texts within a "text editor" in the simulated desktop. The whole site is bonkers ...)

Also: having Ayanami Rei from Neon Genesis Evangelion sitting on your windows.

Wow, thank you! That brings back unexpected memories of playing on my dad's first laptop.

Reminds me of Plasma's ball widget: https://store.kde.org/p/1172489/

Apart from amusement, this served as a nice example when you are giving talks at universities trying to motivate students to tinker. Just multiple gravity by -1 and voila!

You know what would be cool? If I could throw my ball into your dock. And then it's yours. You can throw it back to me.

Networked hacky sack (ball).-

Now that's a thought.-

Exactly the kind of content I come to HN for.

I wish someone would resurrect the Das Blinkenlights Mac screensaver. I think it was frozen in the Power PC age.

Go for it.

If the source was around somewhere, maybe. But I don’t think the author ever released it.

He mentions the old Dashboard ball widget. There was a glitch you could use to put widgets onto your desktop instead, so naturally every school Mac had 20 bouncy balls on it.

I don't think it was a glitch, it was a developer mode. You can run in Terminal:

> defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode YES

Maybe there was also a glitch to do it without the Terminal command; if there was I don't know about it.

I remember there being dev mode and also a glitch, but I could be wrong and don't have a Tiger machine to test with now.

classic. we had the versions of OS X with keyboard shortcuts for global zoom and color invert. took a couple months for the faculty to learn about these shortcuts the hard way..

Invert colors, hold shift to slow down expose animations, spam F11 was what kids did when bored in computer lab

We'd print out the same string sans newlines and watch the console word wraparound make some shapes. All started from a bug someone wrote that we thought was funny.

You make me feel so old

I remember Docklings, a feature of early OSX that let devs put mini-apps in the Dock. I had one showing uptime, undoubtedly just piping the output from the CLI command. That was one of the early steps toward my interest in the CLI, which still wouldn’t be realized for a handful of years. This is a great throwback with more capability than those had. Very cool.

That came from NextStep. They’re still in Windowmaker if you want a nostalgia trip.

NeXT (the whole proposition) was way ahead of its time ...

> early OSX

So early that they got de-facto replaced by MenuItems in 10.1 just six months after 10-dot-0 (though Docklings were in DPs/PB too)

Does anyone know of any similar ideas for an interactive animals/pets for your desktop?

This is the best thing I could find so far to put on an extra monitor. Note you can click to interact with the penguins and also feed them.

https://www.petpenguins.com/

Neko has been around for decades now (but was cuter I think back when the desktop resolution matched the cat)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neko_(software)

Not quite the same thing, but it's at least a cat. And it's in the menu bar.

https://kyome.io/runcat/index.html?lang=en

This actually works quite well: https://github.com/mdonoughe/neko-mac/issues/5#issuecomment-...

An article about Neko and historical archive: https://github.com/eliot-akira/neko

> Does anyone know of any similar ideas for an interactive animals/pets for your desktop?

Maybe try Bonzi Buddy?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy

Trojanware aside, bonzibuddy was so much fun.

I’m genuinely interested to see whether we can throw a little ML at simulating dumb virtual desktop pets… we ought to have made some progress in the last two decades.

Agree. Remember those amazing fish screen savers back in the 90's. Those blew my mind. I have not seen any modern versions of that. Someone please take my money.

https://www.serenescreen.com/v2/

Jim Sachs’ Serene Screen is still going strong. I have it running on Apple Silicon, no problems.

This might be how the Singularity comes about: Anthropic or OpenAI release a "Desktop companion" (a la "Clippy") ...

(Which somewhere deep in the EULA grants then rights to crawl your hard drives to train their models ...

... after all, with the coming "data starvation" our PCs might be the last frontier? Insane amounts of (varied) data and some free, distributed compute. What's not to like, from their perspective?

Edited: "CatGPT" will bring about the Singularity :)

Desktop goose [1] was mildly popular a few years ago

[1] - https://samperson.itch.io/desktop-goose

A friend of mine made a little desktop pet for the last Ludum Dare (big game jam): https://jontopielski.itch.io/desktop-daemon

Windows only though, so maybe not what you're looking for

On multiple platforms (Linux included) there was gdancer , a dancing visualizer plug-in for the xmms mp3 player: http://web.archive.org/web/20050101124624/http://www.figz.co...

> "It's inspired by Nate Heagy's widget for the OS X Dashboard"

Bring back the Dashboard, Apple! The original Dashboard was dropped because of it's shaky technology foundations, but the UX was fantastic and much better than the widgets buried in the notification centre or cluttering the desktop that we have today.

Now that we have modern native Widgets on macOS X, they need a place where they can thrive, and look cool, and be quickly accessible. Dashboard!

I remember having these kinds of desktop toys in Windows, way back when, probably 95 or 98? Just a little joyful thing you could play with. This rules.

I was fond (I know, I know ...) of those dancing er ... dancers you could have cavorting around your taskbar and Star Menu. The days ...

PS. They would use up an obscene amount of memory and wholesale freeze your entire computer every 20 minutes. Didn't matter :)

Someone upthread is right: VirtualGirl it was called. Borderline spyware, but really well done.-

I loved the one that would take a screenshot of your current desktop and you could smash it with a hammer and set it on fire. Little me had some anger issues

How could you not for being forced to use Windows?

Not everyone has a hate boner for Windows.

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.

I think this was the same one that also had the trampoline chicken that would bounce higher and higher each time?

I’ve looked for those a couple times in recent years but with no luck. Are they lost to time or am I just not looking well enough?

What was this thing called?

Desktop Destroyer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJQRBpZKI3g

We got home internet for the first time around then, and its main use (to me) was going to downloads.com and getting screensavers.

I spent hours downloading one that was macaroni doing the Macarena.

(Screensavers, which were a thing back then - and useful in the age of CRTs - and, of course, wallpapers ...

I'm suddenly reminded of the Petz series. I'm surprised that's never come back in some form.

There is something kind of similar as a VS Code extension:

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=tonybalo...

Ah, reminds me of my intro to maths and trig in the good old Flash days! https://www.kirupa.com/developer/as3/physics_bounce_effect_p...

There is still room for a bit of whimsy in computing. Anything to combat the flood of doom is welcome.

Agreed. Totally. Also, the "whimsy" is - I believe - indicative of something deeper ...

PS. Incidentally, "lightheartedness", humor, might just be the ultimate Turing test.-

This will get Sherlocked by Apple in 5 years time. DockBall Pro Max.

I heard Microsoft is working on a subscription service / Teams upgrade

MS ... Ball for Teams! :/

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

First time I saw that Amiga ball bounce, mind = blown.

Strangely reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BumpTop

I remember that, it was cool! This and CodeBubbles are two ideas that I wish had succeeded.

Speaking of ball, check out https://www.moveball.org/

I read the description of the product and came away with the feeling that it's safe to say it's a ball.

As 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.

What if your dock is on the side of the screen? Or do I need to install it and see for myself?

https://github.com/nate-parrott/ball/blob/main/Ball/DockUtil...

Permalink (press 'y' anywhere on github): https://github.com/nate-parrott/ball/blob/609f3bdba21b6a6a59...

It reminds me of the Easter egg in Cool Edit Pro (audio editor): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgPTxXiHvI4

Oh, goodness gracious. Cool Edit. Those were the days ...

Great great piece of software. Bought by Adobe, I believe.-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QokOwvPxrE

Speaking of fun desktop toys, Compiz effects used to be wild.

This is why I visit HN! A fucking ball on my dock---this made my day.

A bug: The ball guesses the location with multiple monitors based on a finder window. If the dock and the Finder window are in separate displays, the ball does not work.

Reminds me of playing around with the WIMP on an Acorn Archimedes in about 1990, making a trivial app in BBC BASIC V that put a bouncing ball on the icon bar. Good times.

I need more recommendations to make my computer (mac) silly

Not Mac, but I like a little cat in my Gnome task bar https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/2986/runcat/

Someone in this comment section suggested this exact thing for mac and I installed it!

It's an effective way to get your laptop in Game Mode, unless you right click-quit, it's detected as a game in focus.

This reminds me of rainmeter, but for fun instead.

Fun fidget utility! I find myself just mindlessly clicking stuff sometimes while I think and this gives me a little bit more to do.

I love this. I think I'll just keep this app open at all times so I always have a little ball on screen. :)

I was going to say this sounds like Go Go Red Ball. Wonderful to see the nod to Nate Heagy in the repo!

I feel it's worth warning as to a concern, though: Do Not Taunt Happy Fun Ball.

If I was still using a Mac as my desktop, my productivity would be completely gone now. =D

narrow escape

Love it. Only thing missing is multi monitor support. I want the ball to go across screens.

Does anyone else think this is the least important distraction to real hackers today?

I'm not sure. What's an example of a more important distraction?

And is a real hacker anything like a true Scotsman?

Reasonable comeback.

Assange news is pretty big. I guess I was surprised that wasn’t top of the page.

And I always defer to the Jargon file for my own axioms. It’s been a long time with that as a North Star.

But can you drop it in the bin?

Your question is a total slam dunk :)

DO NOT TAUNT BALL

This desperately needs a hoop or a bin to aim for, then it's golden.

Somebody upthread proposed the OS trashbin be used for that :)

Do not taunt happy fun ball.

I love the bouncy sounds! Thank you for adding a little whimsy to my day.

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

Looks cool, but I just can’t justify the subscription cost.

(Have you considered the "per-bounce" (egress) tier? :)

I like this, it reminds me of xeyes and similar early UI toys.

I thought I remembered their being a ball; was the package xtoys?

Do you know how much it costs RAM on a macbook

Reminds me of a toy that would let you break/destroy the screen with a variety of tools like hammer, drill, bomb, etc.

Desktop Toys!

I remember playing with this on Windows 95, but it turns out it was made for Windows 3.1 initially.

YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sesM1fygKDs

Internet archive: https://archive.org/details/desktoptoys_201911

I was using this on XP!

Edit: Noooooo I was playing some other program! It looked slightly better than this. Can't find it now :(

TIL PowerToys was a 3.1 thing. Many thanks.-

Finally something useful!!! i love it

Finally an app Apple won’t Sherlock

Now compare this with Apple's 90min multi million dollar bi-yearly recorded presentation where Tim Apple & friends lobotomize the credulous consumers...

'member when computers used to be fun?

I've always wanted a ball.

"And, oh! Father Christmas, if you love me at all, Bring me a big, red, india-rubber ball!"

-- A. A. Milne, _King John's Christmas_

so simple, yet one of the best things to happen to my desktop ever

Idunno exactly why, but the headline feels somehow slightly smutty.

Thats a nasty headline. I first read cock instead of dock. Sorry.

I'm also sorry. I read it the same way too

I like ball. Almost makes me regret moving to Linux a year ago

Such a delightful thing

The spirit of xeyes lives on! I'm happy to see that.

Why are physics engines still so unrealistic?

is there one for windows?

I really did ask myself the same question. I am afraid not (that I could cursorily find ...)

What's this about

I read that title wrong

Pfft. Let's talk about the rent before announcing where I live eh?

Amazing! Now to get this approved as business critical software at work... :)

Dexterity development, ergonomic assistant, etc

It’s a productivity decline indicator. You’re welcome lol

It is essential (essential) to avoid repetitive motion injuries. OSHA agrees :)

for Apple OS

But why?

I love it

honestly perfect. no notes.

love it.

Ball is life

Why does it only run on macOS 13+?

Boring. There was/is a Linux dock which was main demo of a physics engine. We could toss icons which would bounce off screen corner and land in some part of the dock. You never know what order your icons are in.

Dont forget to notice how old the video is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSZtTo1lXP8

It's not a competition

Man, you must be fun at parties. Why do you need to put down the person who made a fun little project because it has been done in the past differently? It's a weird thing that we do in the tech community, I can't imagine people who knit to say the same kind of things.

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