I like the fact that while the site isn't mobile compatible, they actually took the time to identify mobile visitors and give them a friendly warning about it :)
Exactly this. It's such a simple concept (spirographs themselves), but using this site put me into an almost trance-like calm. And clicking buttons to choose the "plastic wheels" was even easier than finding them in the box.
This is something of a tangent, but this is kind of a cool visualization of what is sometimes called a "spinorial" object -- an object which can undergo a full rotation and yet not come back to its original state. Here the number of rotations necessary to restore the original state depends on the number of teeth on the gears.
A more classic spinorial object is a belt attached to, say, a book, or apparently your own arm holding up an oriented plate:
I've always loved that you can get such profound geometry out of spinographs: flowers of life, toruses, and what look like pentagonal solar-magnetic bands... a reality hack to be sure.
I understand that it probably doesn't work with the intended aesthetic, but I kept looking for a "make it go" button, because using a nub-mouse to wind the gear around repeatedly is hard.
Looks like a bit of framework bloat (in my opinion), this is really the kind of thing that could cleanly be done with minimal frameworks and libraries. But the source still looks nice (and there's even a windows screensaver version??)
Here's a first-hand user's experience: It took me a bit to figure out how to make it work. I thought I should click the pen hole and press my mouse key as I move it around. Maybe a simple how-to description to get me started would be helpful. Of course, I could just play with it a little more :)
This really is impressively done.
(yet) liberated from the constrains of real plastic begs elements of special significance. For instance, where's the möbius gear?
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 62.8 ms ] threadSo this won't work well on an iPad...
http://i.imgur.com/ARokLzv.jpg
A more classic spinorial object is a belt attached to, say, a book, or apparently your own arm holding up an oriented plate:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_trick
Very nice work! Congrats!
Wonder if that will be free as well. How would one go about transforming a (desktop) web app such as this one into an app for each mobile platform?
Edit: and here's the source:
https://github.com/nfriend/inspirograph
Looks like a bit of framework bloat (in my opinion), this is really the kind of thing that could cleanly be done with minimal frameworks and libraries. But the source still looks nice (and there's even a windows screensaver version??)
Here's a first-hand user's experience: It took me a bit to figure out how to make it work. I thought I should click the pen hole and press my mouse key as I move it around. Maybe a simple how-to description to get me started would be helpful. Of course, I could just play with it a little more :)