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.
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..
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.
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.
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 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
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’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.
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 :)
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.
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...
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 247 ms ] thread> 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.
-- A. A. Milne, _King John's Christmas_
https://web.archive.org/web/20110301011442/http://gogoredbal...
PS. They would use up an obscene amount of memory and wholesale freeze your entire computer every 20 minutes. Didn't matter :)
https://tenor.com/search/man-smashes-computer-gifs
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?
I spent hours downloading one that was macaroni doing the Macarena.
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=tonybalo...
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/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neko_(software)
https://kyome.io/runcat/index.html?lang=en
Maybe try Bonzi Buddy?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy
Jim Sachs’ Serene Screen is still going strong. I have it running on Apple Silicon, no problems.
(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 :)
[1] - https://samperson.itch.io/desktop-goose
Windows only though, so maybe not what you're looking for
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!
- https://archive.org/details/virtuagirl265
It has been found worthy of preservation.-
https://dustinbrett.com/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neko_(software)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40756670
Now with state of the art GFE AI!
I miss that simplicity / playfulness / aesthic of that era (yes I am old, please get off my lawn)
(She’s still there, doing flips and precision bitmap alignment)
First rule of troubleshooting was always “turn off all extensions.” :)
... while we gladly just "prompt" - which, in itself, might be an exporatory technique. We'll see.-
(hello, fellow old!)
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...
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 ...)
TL;DR: playfulness is killed by the arms race of constantly upgrading to the latest version of everything.
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)