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I keep making things out of checkboxes
- Lio 5y agoAh this is just wonderful! I love this kind of experimental noodling with no real purpose except fun. I wonder what other form elements can be pushed into weird usages? I'd guess radio buttons and select boxes with ASCII in could be next.
- wbobeirne 5y agoIf you enjoy this kind of (ab)use of browser elements, I highly suggest the works of Matthew Rayfield: https://matthewrayfield.com/ https://matthewrayfield.com/. Popup trombone is a work of art.
- mzs 5y agoneat: https://matthewrayfield.com/goodies/inspect-this-snake/ https://matthewrayfield.com/goodies/inspect-this-snake/
- kerryoco 5y agoIf you could visualize a series of these getting smaller and smaller til the point they are indistinguishable from pixels, a la Powers of 10 video, it could be a really fun teaching / learning tool as to how far our modern displays have come.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- skeletron 5y agoWhy checkboxes though? There are perfectly good ordinary pixels to do all this with.
- akarki15 5y agowhy not i guess? :P
- da39a3ee 5y agowoosh! I can never work out whether there's an in-joke on HN where everyone pretends that they don't have a sense of humor, or whether the truth is a less favorable statement about the HN community. HN is great, but this thread is an example of where it doesn't do so well, since TFA is inherently humorous, and it's not possible to respond to it from an entirely humorless position.
- ionwake 5y agoAwesome
- RoryH 5y agoMake things out of Checkboxes... check!
- amelius 5y agoTry making Conway's Game of Life. And with the ability to check/uncheck the boxes and influence the course of the simulation.
- TimTheTinker 5y agoWhy not switch to canvas rendering though?
- alserio 5y agoBecause then he would need to implement the checkboxes in a canvas, when there's a good implementation already available in the browser
- colejohnson66 5y agoThe point isn’t to be logical. It’s simply because it could be done.
- strken 5y agoFunnily enough, he's already done it: https://www.bryanbraun.com/checkboxland/ https://www.bryanbraun.com/checkboxland/
- mypastself 5y agoThis may be like one of those great 19th century discoveries in math and physics for which there were no real-world use cases at the time, but were applied decades later with world-changing consequences. Some day, Apple logo made out of nothing but checkboxes might just save the world.
- nathancahill 5y agoNot sure why he's worried about not being marketable, he checks all the boxes.
- roland35 5y agoWell, he also is unchecking all the boxes too
- DonHopkins 5y agoHe's worried people will get ticked off at him, and think he's two tacos short of a combo box.
- bryanrasmussen 5y agomaybe he's just worried employers are looking for someone who can think outside the checkbox.
- kamilgrudzien 5y agoThis made me angry enough to upvote
- simmo9000 5y agoAdding colour would be a great way to waste even more time on this epic idea...
- Tepix 5y agoNeat! Next step: Variable size checkboxes. Something you can't do with ordinary pixels.
- jcims 5y agoCheckboxes made out of checkboxes
- Tepix 5y agoAlso, morse code using checkboxes.
- usrusr 5y agoThat's the second obvious omission from the article, other than the Conway's which is in the playground link. Checkbox made out of checkboxes should then be put into an animation loop, zooming out to single chexel.
- _jstreet 5y agoThe sidebar of checkboxland[1] has a checkbox made out of checkboxes. [1]: https://www.bryanbraun.com/checkboxland/ https://www.bryanbraun.com/checkboxland/
- residualmind 5y agoFinally something useful!
- evanb 5y agoIn case the author sees this: when I click in the last row of the laser demo, the 'beam' never gets started---the box just sits there, checked.
- saevarom 5y agoBut only the first and then every fourth :)
- bryanbraun 5y agoGood catch. I posted an issue: https://github.com/bryanbraun/checkboxland/issues/16 https://github.com/bryanbraun/checkboxland/issues/16
- bartread 5y agoI just left this comment directly on the article: I don't think you can really say you've exhaused this until you can run DOOM rendered with checkboxes. You might need to get into checkbox dithering with multiple checkboxes to give you a few different fill levels, and use really small checkboxes, so you get both the resolution and can actually see what you're shooting at. I know: I'm a bastard.
- yetanother-1 5y agoGood idea, but do we have to destroy our browsers?
- bryanbraun 5y agoAndrew Healey just took a pass at this and did a great write-up about it here: https://healeycodes.com/doom-rendered-via-checkboxes https://healeycodes.com/doom-rendered-via-checkboxes It looks decent but dithering would be nice so I created an issue for it here: https://github.com/bryanbraun/checkboxland/issues/20 https://github.com/bryanbraun/checkboxland/issues/20
- IgorPartola 5y agoI wonder if radio boxes would be better pixels for DOOM.
- lifthrasiir 5y agoGiven it is interactive, he should instead make a virtual touch screen that is connected to the actual hardware that runs a WebAssembly implementation of DOOM in a modern web browser.
- rudian 5y agoWelcome to Reddit, but for nerds. Interesting posts get lost, and this hits the first place.
- dang 5y agoIf you feel that way, you should upvote posts you find more interesting.
- lardolan 5y agoHow could I downvote this?
- Kiro 5y agoYou need more karma.
- seoulmetro 5y agoI'm surprised this got so much praise. It's cool and quirky but it doesn't seem like anything special. I guess the truth is, HN really wants to be Reddit. Impressive? Interesting? Wonderful? Not to me at least. And I'm struggling with why it is to anyone else, but that's on me.
- nunodonato 5y agowhere's Conway's game of life? :)
- _def 5y agohttps://github.com/bryanbraun/checkboxland/tree/main/docs/demos/game-of-life https://github.com/bryanbraun/checkboxland/tree/main/docs/de...
- oli-g 5y agoAlternatively, it's also already hosted online: https://www.bryanbraun.com/checkboxland/docs/demos/game-of-life/ https://www.bryanbraun.com/checkboxland/docs/demos/game-of-l...
- furypt 5y agoThis is so funny!
- yunruse 5y agoThe sheer simplicity of this idea - a 1-bit grid, which you can interact with in real-time - echoes that of Pico-8 [1], a fantasy console with strict limits such that you're not overwhelmed with ideas, but instead given bounds to play with. Its limits keep it realistic: you can do immensely wondrous things with the console, but its graphic and music style are limited, and as such it provides much more of an incentive to make a game - it's far less overwhelming, and you can concentrate on fun. But also, it offers a challenge! As you begin to hit the limits, you come up with clever tricks to save space, and because the computer isn't blisteringly fast, you're pushing yourself as much as you are the computer. [1]: https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php But this checkbox playground would be, in my eyes, an even better virtual console - reduced to the bare minimum of what you could make into a game that can be enjoyed. Provide a nice interface such that the user only has to write the game code, provide events to hook into - start(), frame() and click(x, y) - and this would be an immensely satisfying console to immediately get to work on, as rather than worry about graphics and audio, you're free to get right into making it fun. ...also, it'd be an excellent framework for teaching kids how to code! :D
- rozab 5y agoI'm struggling to find any of them now, bit I think there's many sites that provide a toy and interface similar to what you describe. One in particular, I recall, provided a grid of colourable dots and a minimal language to program them in. There were social features to browse demos people had written. Anyone remember what it's called?
- myfonj 5y agohttps://tixy.land/ https://tixy.land/ maybe? (https://twitter.com/aemkei/status/1323399877611708416 https://twitter.com/aemkei/status/1323399877611708416) (16 × 16 grid of dots governed by a "shader-like" (?) function getting time, order, column and row indices arguments; negative values red, positive white, zero proximity shrinks.) Not sure about those "social features", though you can just share the URL with your creating
- 5y ago
- smitty1e 5y agoI'm immediately seeing the possibility of turning checkboxes into registers and RAM and rolling out Knuth's MMIX from TAOCP[1]. I mean, if you're going nuts. . . [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Computer_Programming https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Computer_Programm...
- colejohnson66 5y agoConsay’s Game of Life is Turing Complete. Could use Golly’s engine and render using checkboxes. Has anyone implemented MMIX in CGOL? https://www.bryanbraun.com/checkboxland/docs/demos/game-of-life/ https://www.bryanbraun.com/checkboxland/docs/demos/game-of-l...
- beardyw 5y agoIt's a tick infestation.
- Smar 5y agoBut where is checkers!
- kangalioo 5y agoThe author might have fun with novation launchpads :D A 9x9 matrix of pressable, programmatically lightable RGB buttons While intended for music production, people have used it for interactive lightshows or games
- mkr-hn 5y agoThere's a free tool that integrates with Ableton Live to make these easier to set up. I can't remember the name and Google is (as usual) useless for finding it, but I do remember it wasn't updated for Live 11 last I checked. Maybe someone else will be able to name it.
- oldsecondhand 5y agoNovation Components?
- mkr-hn 5y agoThat lets you assemble views from a handful of pre-fab components. What I'm thinking of is a full pad controller light show suite. Components doesn't have anything like that.
- relaxing 5y agoSee also the Monome (and myriad clones.)
- mirekrusin 5y agoRgb checkboxes?
- tiborsaas 5y agoIt's possible with the hue rotation CSS filter: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/filter-function/hue-rotate https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/filter-func...()
- bryanbraun 5y agoAlso the new CSS accent-color property. My coworker hacked together a demo that's pretty wild: https://twitter.com/nathanAlan/status/1436145205019922440 https://twitter.com/nathanAlan/status/1436145205019922440
- tiborsaas 5y agoOh neat, I didn't know about this property.
- bscphil 5y agoUnless I missed them, a bunch of the demos aren't linked directly in the page. Here's Bad Apple: https://www.bryanbraun.com/checkboxland/docs/demos/bad-apple/ https://www.bryanbraun.com/checkboxland/docs/demos/bad-apple...
- bryanbraun 5y agoGood callout... I updated the post to link this one.
- mrspeaker 5y agoI remember someone had made an early iPhone game out of UI elements (around 2009 ish?). I thought it was such a cool idea, and spent a bunch of time messing around with "ui-elements-as-graphics". My favourite thing I came up with was sine-wave scrollbars: https://www.mrspeaker.net/dev/sinescrollbars/ https://www.mrspeaker.net/dev/sinescrollbars/
- mkr-hn 5y agoCastle of the Winds' characters, items, and monsters were made entirely out of Windows icons. You could crack it open in a resource editor and change most things. There's probably a lot more of these between your example and mine. Someone should make a list.
- bryanbraun 5y agoVery clever! It kind of reminds me of this pattern I saw that someone made out of range sliders (though not as animated): https://codepen.io/xdesro/pen/dyRNqqY https://codepen.io/xdesro/pen/dyRNqqY
- tambourine_man 5y agoI get a blank screen…
- arrow7000 5y agoMe too, but then I'm on Android.
- tambourine_man 5y agoMac Safari, iPhone Safari, desktop Chrome…
- egypturnash 5y agoWorks on Mac Safari for me.
- jhncls 5y agoIn a similar undertaking, Inigo Quilez (of Shadertoy fame) once created an animation using the cells of a spreadsheet [0] as pixels. [0] https://youtu.be/JnCkF62gkOY https://youtu.be/JnCkF62gkOY
- alok-g 5y agoNice! You may checkout my this work: :-) https://github.com/amzn/computer-vision-basics-in-microsoft-excel https://github.com/amzn/computer-vision-basics-in-microsoft-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22357374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22357374
- shrubby 5y agoThis was cool. Definitely going to use it somewhere.
- tantalor 5y agoReminds me Rozin's mechanical mirrors. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kV8v2GKC8WA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kV8v2GKC8WA
- bryanbraun 5y agoThis is giving me ideas. Thanks for sharing!
- agumonkey 5y agonext, adapt https://www.a1k0n.net/2011/07/20/donut-math.html https://www.a1k0n.net/2011/07/20/donut-math.html
- fredley 5y agoI feel like there needs to be a way to control system volume made out of e.g. a webcam checkbox filter.
- durmonski 5y agoWoW :D Amazing!
- yawaworht1978 5y agoThis is very impressive, especially the video with 3d effect. Can we check the repos? Did you use libraries or did you create a library for this? I would love to see a slider as well, maybe with similar effects like transitions in PowerPoint. Is this all Js rendered or does it use html and css?
- mcintyre1994 5y agoHis library is here: https://github.com/bryanbraun/checkboxland https://github.com/bryanbraun/checkboxland - seems super readable from a quick look!
- seoulmetro 5y agoI'm not sure what makes this impressive. I can get that it's cool and quirky, but at no point does it make me wonder or think that it's impressive. Would we say the same thing about a bunch of over-enlarged pixels?
- runnr_az 5y agoThe best projects are when someone talented uses their considerable abilities on something really really pointless.
- anthk 5y agoUnix itself was born in order to play a game, so yes. Heck, today every BSD ships with BSD games in base.
- scop 5y agoYour comment reminds me of a little gem of a book, Leisure The Basis of Culture by philosopher Josef Pieper. > The act of worship creates a store of real wealth that cannot be consumed by the workaday world. It sets up an area where calculation is thrown to the winds and goods are deliberately squandered, where usefulness is forgotten and generosity reigns. Such wastefulness is, we repeat, true wealth; the wealth of the festival time.
- quercusa 5y agoGreat little book; truly counter-cultural.
- tombert 5y agoThis is a bit tangential, but I've been completely impressed by a ton of the Bad Apple "ports" to various platforms (particularly the Sega Genesis and the Atari 2600). It's amazing how the simple choice of making a mostly-binary music video has made a song popular in hacker culture.
- ant6n 5y agoIn the linked video set, the game boy original one is fake, but the game boy color one seems legit (probably helped a lot by the hdma that allows copying tile data into vram during hblank). Theres an old japanese page that seems to explain how it works: http://web.archive.org/web/20121128095253/www.geocities.jp/submarine600/html/apple.html http://web.archive.org/web/20121128095253/www.geocities.jp/s...
- tombert 5y agoUgh, my naive brain didn't even consider things being faked. I know the Sega Genesis one works in an emulator (I don't have a physical Sega Genesis anymore so I can't try it on an everdrive or anything), but I haven't actually tried the Atari one in any capacity, so that one could be BS.
- xrd 5y agoIs there a CSS file I can drop in to change them to radio buttons somehow?
- NHQ 5y agoI too keep making things out of checkboxes and radio buttons; increasingly my tool-like UIs are dominated by variations on the label/input CSS trick. Naturally, that is what I thought the article was about; but everything the author does can be done equally simplistically with canvas, webGL, divs, text; the demos are more about the parsing of the input than the display technique.
- em3rgent0rdr 5y agoserious question: what is the performance of using checkboxes compared to other methods of rendering in a browser?
- em3rgent0rdr 5y agomy first guess is that these checkboxes might be faster than painting to a canvas.
- wheybags 5y agoI would really, really hope not. Certainly raw rendering using the underlying graphics api would be faster. If the canvas api adds more overhead than the entire stack of tech required to render a HTML native widget, then something has gone seriously wrong.
- ed312 5y agoThis strongly reminds me of The Glass Bead Game (Das Glasperlenspiel) by Herman Hesse[1]. The idea of simplifying and restricting the creative space into a grid, but then assigning abstract value to the grid (e.g. game of life, minesweeper) seems to be a persistent meme in computers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Glass_Bead_Game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Glass_Bead_Game
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- CountHackulus 5y agoIf you're interested in this sort of thing, check out the TMDC or Text-Mode Demo Competition were it's the same idea but 80x50 text instead of textboxes. Hasn't really been run in a while, but it's a really fun exercise.
- 8eye 5y agocan confirm, website checks out.. sorry the pun was right there. i had to check it off my list.. i won’t go any further with this, or else i’ll have to get checked into a facility.. ok i am done.