8 ms·

Show HN: Parallax wallpaper engine for Linux and Windows

225 points by Czikenix 4y ago

spyremeown 4y ago
Super neat. Congratulations, OP.
SaintSeiya84 4y ago
Cool thanks for sharing
muratsu 4y ago
I don't know if you're interested in monetizing this, but Wallpaper Engine on Steam is really popular (>500k reviews, 75k concurrent users). There's definitely a market for this type of product if you can find a way to differentiate yourself and crack the gtm strategy. eg seems like the wallpaper engine doesn't support linux yet, which may be your early wedge. Good luck! https://store.steampowered.com/app/431960/Wallpaper_Engine/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/431960/Wallpaper_Engine/
- Czikenix 4y ago
  Thanks for Your advise! It sounds really interesting, I have to think about it
- prophesi 4y ago
  I could see adding a nice GUI app for uploading/managing layers, editing the config, etc making waves on Steam.
- malnourish 4y ago
  Believe it or not, Wallpaper Engine apparently works through Proton and a KDE plugin: https://www.protondb.com/app/431960 https://www.protondb.com/app/431960
behnamoh 4y ago
[flagged]
- dijksterhuis 4y ago
  Sometimes it’s nice to have a bit of fun.
- prophesi 4y ago
  I don't understand the sentiment of this at all. It's fun to create things, I've learned the most from working on "toy" projects, it helps with job burnout, and could potentially become a new product/company/revenue-source.
- rom-antics 4y ago
  Linux also started out as a toy project. https://fossbytes.com/linus-torvaldss-famous-email-first-linux-announcement/ https://fossbytes.com/linus-torvaldss-famous-email-first-lin...
- dokem 4y ago
  Where did the open source touch you?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- nunobrito 4y ago
  I bet you're fun at parties
- Narishma 4y ago
  > How many human hours should be wasted on toy projects that only cause distraction and get abandoned shortly after? As many hours as possible.
- Czikenix 4y ago
  If You don't like the idea of my project, You can just ignore it. I spent my free time to create this and I'm happy, that someone likes it. I train my programming skill and learn new thing by doing projects like this. I would never learn programming if I didn't play with it.
- out-of-ideas 4y ago
jhallenworld 4y ago
You need to use the Wii remote in reverse so you can make a fake window. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw (can't believe this was 15 years ago now..)
- albert_e 4y ago
  This is brilliant! Why haven't we seen this idea developed further into consumer devices by now
  - rzzzt 4y ago
    Without any accompanying pair of glasses the parallax effect is only convincing for a single viewer.
    - airstrike 4y ago
      How often do you really have more than one viewer per screen?
  - qbasic_forever 4y ago
    Amazon's failed Android phone infamously had this feature. There was a front facing IR camera IIRC which tracked your face/gaze and made the environment change as you looked into it. https://venturebeat.com/games/how-3d-works-on-the-amazon-fire-phone/ https://venturebeat.com/games/how-3d-works-on-the-amazon-fir...
- otterpro 4y ago
  I remember him, Johnny Lee. I actually bought his Poor man's stabilizer ~15 years ago because I couldn't afford to buy Steadicam. EDIT: He also worked as dev for XBox Kinect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Lee_(computer_scientist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Lee_(computer_scientist...
  - guessbest 4y ago
    XBox Kinect had so much potential but sadly smart phones appeared to eat up the entire market. Even ARKit hasn't really done much. VR just doesn't seem to be much of a market except for things like VRChat.
jamespo 4y ago
Does this work on wayland?
- Czikenix 4y ago
  Unfortunately no, but I'm going to make it work on wayland too at some point
  - hanslovsky 4y ago
    Starred the repo so I can follow wayland progress. What a fun project!
maybelsyrup 4y ago
This is exactly the sort of fun, random, small project that reminds me of the more anarchic and playful older days of computing and the web. Those days are gone and not coming back, but their spirit lives on in things like this. It’s not some earth shattering YCombinator thing, it’s not a SaaS, it’s not (at least to my eye) about money — it’s a neat thing to do with a piece of screen real estate we all look at a million times a day. Not to be melodramatic but the world needs a lot more “heh, neat”.
- davidandgoliath 4y ago
  Those days are still very much here, there is just a lot more noise from the opposite end of the computing world.
- rektide 4y ago
  It's a long way around but I think/believe we'll have some general purpose computing/systems research wins, that start to expose some computing as fun, interesting, casual, and from there we'll see a budding "heh, neat" attitude. The atmosphere around computing had gotten hypersaturated by the intense capital flows & software heavy-industries that have built up. Serving the industrial need has been an overehelming priority. And it's really outshadowed much of the fart around & make fun stuff element that made it a scene of interest for so long. I continue to tend to believe there's a ton of looming change in what computing will be when it grows up more. While most of that work gets concentrated in refinement & iteration & support of heavy-industrial software, we also keep finding/stumbling on stupendously more straightforward ways of doing things (react components/vdom, then hoc, then hooks). The ability of very small ideas to more capably express computing has enormous implications. The web is interesting here because the page is a bit of a canvas, resculptable by anyone knowing a little introductory javascript+html+css. Whatever innovation computing has, ultimately most of it strongly contrasts, is esoteric, no matter how useful it could be. Almost all the work is sent through an extremely small funnel where a handful of people are at all familiar with the system. For bigger libraries, it might be hundreds. It's bad that most works are obscure & inaccessible, but worse, most software being opaque means rven though it's everywhere around us, we never can learn it. The world is obscure, it's mechanism happening at nanoscale levels we cant get to & which are still down-compiled assembly codes with most of the meaning wiped away. Computing needs a kick towards extropic ends. Creativity will re-emerge, but only if there's an exosystem or ecosystem of computing, and right now we are small isolated islands, producing appliances, fixed systems, not computing software. Somewhere computing has to start letting users back in.
mikub 4y ago
Nice idea, I really like it.
- Czikenix 4y ago
  Thank You!
- hummus_bae 4y ago
  [dead]
matthewhartmans 4y ago
Really cool and super neat! Well done OP!
- Czikenix 4y ago
  Thanks! ;D
raydiatian 4y ago
One thing that would probably make this adoption fodder for the custom Arch Linux & r/LinuxPorn communities is if it were just a desktop that side scrolled with parallax. Those folks seem to strongly reward anything even remotely 8-bit. I get that drops the mouse-driven parallax, just an idea.
- pasquinelli 4y ago
  what's wrong with both?
  - raydiatian 4y ago
    Absolutely nothing
zorr 4y ago
This looks cool! Congrats on releasing. The Linux installation steps look a bit funky to me: Downloading a zip file from the internet and unzipping directly to "/". It's not very different from piping curl output to bash.
- Czikenix 4y ago
  Thanks! I think most Linux users probably build it using make, although I decided to add a compiled zip anyway
memco 4y ago
Could something like this be built for macOS too? I remember there used to be a Quartz plugin you could use to have a screensaver as a background so you could get animated backgrounds, but something like this would be fun to have. The issue with the screensaver as a desktop background if I recall was rapid battery drain: what kind of resources are required to use this one?
- Czikenix 4y ago
  I'm sure it can be done and I'm going to do some research about it in the near future. I would like to make it available on macOS too
  - ratmice 4y ago
    presumably https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coregraphics/cgwindowlevelkey/desktopwindow https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coregraphics/cgwin...
radiojasper 4y ago
This is fun, but I wonder how to remove it again? If I just select another wallpaper it instantly overwrites it again with your parallax wallpaper. Fun lil project tho!
noisy_boy 4y ago
If only I was using a "wallpaper". With dark mode on, even a dark grey wallpaper emits enough brightness to make things distracting for me e.g. when watching movies on the main monitor while the other monitors don't have anything on them. Nowadays my wallpaper is a jet black Image.
out-of-ideas 4y ago
@czikenix: first thing I went for was checking the AUR for this by searching for `lwp`; the name exists in AUR as a "Lightweight process library"; names are hard so good luck if you end up re-naming it <g>. will get to testing it out soon and looking forward to it
- Czikenix 4y ago
  It looks like I have to change the name before uploading to AUR :/
peefy 4y ago
I like neat and compact projects!!!
mholt 4y ago
This is really fun! Can you make the default wallpaper higher-res? Specifically 5120x1440 -- or even double those sizes for hi-dpi displays. Right now I'm looking at some very pixelated art. But I love the default wallpaper!
pasquinelli 4y ago
it'd be neat if you could make it automatically scroll.
tommica 4y ago
Neat - gonna try this when I get home!
panki27 4y ago
I have a script on a webserver that generates a "wallpaper of the day" based on the date - it could be adapted rather easily to create separate layers. Feel free to check it out, reload for a slightly different one: https://www.theresno.cloud/gen/wpotd.py https://www.theresno.cloud/gen/wpotd.py Colors do a full rainbow over 365 days, the number of layers represents passed months this year...
avinassh 4y ago
This is very cool! How does this work internally?
- Czikenix 4y ago
  On Linux it takes a handle to the RootWindow and starts drawing on it, but if You are using a compositor it creates a new window with parameters similar to RootWindow. On Windows it works similar to the second case

225 points by Czikenix 4y ago

spyremeown 4y ago

Super neat. Congratulations, OP.

SaintSeiya84 4y ago

Cool thanks for sharing

muratsu 4y ago

I don't know if you're interested in monetizing this, but Wallpaper Engine on Steam is really popular (>500k reviews, 75k concurrent users). There's definitely a market for this type of product if you can find a way to differentiate yourself and crack the gtm strategy. eg seems like the wallpaper engine doesn't support linux yet, which may be your early wedge. Good luck! https://store.steampowered.com/app/431960/Wallpaper_Engine/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/431960/Wallpaper_Engine/

Czikenix 4y ago
Thanks for Your advise! It sounds really interesting, I have to think about it
prophesi 4y ago
I could see adding a nice GUI app for uploading/managing layers, editing the config, etc making waves on Steam.
malnourish 4y ago
Believe it or not, Wallpaper Engine apparently works through Proton and a KDE plugin: https://www.protondb.com/app/431960 https://www.protondb.com/app/431960

behnamoh 4y ago

[flagged]

dijksterhuis 4y ago
Sometimes it’s nice to have a bit of fun.
prophesi 4y ago
I don't understand the sentiment of this at all. It's fun to create things, I've learned the most from working on "toy" projects, it helps with job burnout, and could potentially become a new product/company/revenue-source.
rom-antics 4y ago
Linux also started out as a toy project. https://fossbytes.com/linus-torvaldss-famous-email-first-linux-announcement/ https://fossbytes.com/linus-torvaldss-famous-email-first-lin...
dokem 4y ago
Where did the open source touch you?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nunobrito 4y ago
I bet you're fun at parties
Narishma 4y ago
> How many human hours should be wasted on toy projects that only cause distraction and get abandoned shortly after? As many hours as possible.
Czikenix 4y ago
If You don't like the idea of my project, You can just ignore it. I spent my free time to create this and I'm happy, that someone likes it. I train my programming skill and learn new thing by doing projects like this. I would never learn programming if I didn't play with it.
out-of-ideas 4y ago

jhallenworld 4y ago

You need to use the Wii remote in reverse so you can make a fake window. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw (can't believe this was 15 years ago now..)

albert_e 4y ago
This is brilliant! Why haven't we seen this idea developed further into consumer devices by now
- rzzzt 4y ago
  Without any accompanying pair of glasses the parallax effect is only convincing for a single viewer.
  - airstrike 4y ago
    How often do you really have more than one viewer per screen?
- qbasic_forever 4y ago
  Amazon's failed Android phone infamously had this feature. There was a front facing IR camera IIRC which tracked your face/gaze and made the environment change as you looked into it. https://venturebeat.com/games/how-3d-works-on-the-amazon-fire-phone/ https://venturebeat.com/games/how-3d-works-on-the-amazon-fir...
otterpro 4y ago
I remember him, Johnny Lee. I actually bought his Poor man's stabilizer ~15 years ago because I couldn't afford to buy Steadicam. EDIT: He also worked as dev for XBox Kinect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Lee_(computer_scientist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Lee_(computer_scientist...
- guessbest 4y ago
  XBox Kinect had so much potential but sadly smart phones appeared to eat up the entire market. Even ARKit hasn't really done much. VR just doesn't seem to be much of a market except for things like VRChat.

jamespo 4y ago

Does this work on wayland?

Czikenix 4y ago
Unfortunately no, but I'm going to make it work on wayland too at some point
- hanslovsky 4y ago
  Starred the repo so I can follow wayland progress. What a fun project!

maybelsyrup 4y ago

This is exactly the sort of fun, random, small project that reminds me of the more anarchic and playful older days of computing and the web. Those days are gone and not coming back, but their spirit lives on in things like this. It’s not some earth shattering YCombinator thing, it’s not a SaaS, it’s not (at least to my eye) about money — it’s a neat thing to do with a piece of screen real estate we all look at a million times a day. Not to be melodramatic but the world needs a lot more “heh, neat”.

davidandgoliath 4y ago
Those days are still very much here, there is just a lot more noise from the opposite end of the computing world.
rektide 4y ago
It's a long way around but I think/believe we'll have some general purpose computing/systems research wins, that start to expose some computing as fun, interesting, casual, and from there we'll see a budding "heh, neat" attitude. The atmosphere around computing had gotten hypersaturated by the intense capital flows & software heavy-industries that have built up. Serving the industrial need has been an overehelming priority. And it's really outshadowed much of the fart around & make fun stuff element that made it a scene of interest for so long. I continue to tend to believe there's a ton of looming change in what computing will be when it grows up more. While most of that work gets concentrated in refinement & iteration & support of heavy-industrial software, we also keep finding/stumbling on stupendously more straightforward ways of doing things (react components/vdom, then hoc, then hooks). The ability of very small ideas to more capably express computing has enormous implications. The web is interesting here because the page is a bit of a canvas, resculptable by anyone knowing a little introductory javascript+html+css. Whatever innovation computing has, ultimately most of it strongly contrasts, is esoteric, no matter how useful it could be. Almost all the work is sent through an extremely small funnel where a handful of people are at all familiar with the system. For bigger libraries, it might be hundreds. It's bad that most works are obscure & inaccessible, but worse, most software being opaque means rven though it's everywhere around us, we never can learn it. The world is obscure, it's mechanism happening at nanoscale levels we cant get to & which are still down-compiled assembly codes with most of the meaning wiped away. Computing needs a kick towards extropic ends. Creativity will re-emerge, but only if there's an exosystem or ecosystem of computing, and right now we are small isolated islands, producing appliances, fixed systems, not computing software. Somewhere computing has to start letting users back in.

mikub 4y ago

Nice idea, I really like it.

Czikenix 4y ago
Thank You!
hummus_bae 4y ago
[dead]

matthewhartmans 4y ago

Really cool and super neat! Well done OP!

Czikenix 4y ago
Thanks! ;D

raydiatian 4y ago

One thing that would probably make this adoption fodder for the custom Arch Linux & r/LinuxPorn communities is if it were just a desktop that side scrolled with parallax. Those folks seem to strongly reward anything even remotely 8-bit. I get that drops the mouse-driven parallax, just an idea.

pasquinelli 4y ago
what's wrong with both?
- raydiatian 4y ago
  Absolutely nothing

zorr 4y ago

This looks cool! Congrats on releasing. The Linux installation steps look a bit funky to me: Downloading a zip file from the internet and unzipping directly to "/". It's not very different from piping curl output to bash.

Czikenix 4y ago
Thanks! I think most Linux users probably build it using make, although I decided to add a compiled zip anyway

memco 4y ago

Could something like this be built for macOS too? I remember there used to be a Quartz plugin you could use to have a screensaver as a background so you could get animated backgrounds, but something like this would be fun to have. The issue with the screensaver as a desktop background if I recall was rapid battery drain: what kind of resources are required to use this one?

Czikenix 4y ago
I'm sure it can be done and I'm going to do some research about it in the near future. I would like to make it available on macOS too
- ratmice 4y ago
  presumably https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coregraphics/cgwindowlevelkey/desktopwindow https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coregraphics/cgwin...

radiojasper 4y ago

This is fun, but I wonder how to remove it again? If I just select another wallpaper it instantly overwrites it again with your parallax wallpaper. Fun lil project tho!

noisy_boy 4y ago

If only I was using a "wallpaper". With dark mode on, even a dark grey wallpaper emits enough brightness to make things distracting for me e.g. when watching movies on the main monitor while the other monitors don't have anything on them. Nowadays my wallpaper is a jet black Image.

out-of-ideas 4y ago

@czikenix: first thing I went for was checking the AUR for this by searching for `lwp`; the name exists in AUR as a "Lightweight process library"; names are hard so good luck if you end up re-naming it <g>. will get to testing it out soon and looking forward to it

Czikenix 4y ago
It looks like I have to change the name before uploading to AUR :/

peefy 4y ago

I like neat and compact projects!!!

mholt 4y ago

This is really fun! Can you make the default wallpaper higher-res? Specifically 5120x1440 -- or even double those sizes for hi-dpi displays. Right now I'm looking at some very pixelated art. But I love the default wallpaper!

pasquinelli 4y ago

it'd be neat if you could make it automatically scroll.

tommica 4y ago

Neat - gonna try this when I get home!

panki27 4y ago

I have a script on a webserver that generates a "wallpaper of the day" based on the date - it could be adapted rather easily to create separate layers. Feel free to check it out, reload for a slightly different one: https://www.theresno.cloud/gen/wpotd.py https://www.theresno.cloud/gen/wpotd.py Colors do a full rainbow over 365 days, the number of layers represents passed months this year...

avinassh 4y ago

This is very cool! How does this work internally?

Czikenix 4y ago
On Linux it takes a handle to the RootWindow and starts drawing on it, but if You are using a compositor it creates a new window with parameters similar to RootWindow. On Windows it works similar to the second case