Dash-Board-for-Newton-OS
gaseous-giganticus
Dash-Board-for-Newton-OS | gaseous-giganticus | |
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5 | 18 | |
85 | 109 | |
- | - | |
0.0 | 5.3 | |
almost 11 years ago | 5 months ago | |
C | ||
- | GNU General Public License v3.0 only |
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Dash-Board-for-Newton-OS
- Dash Board 2013 for Newton OS – A Comic Tragedy in Nine Acts
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Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've ever built?
For me, it was the second application I ever released, when I was a student at university and still didn't really know how to program properly.
The application was Dash Board[1] for Newton OS, and it only ran on the final generation of Newton hardware (created by Apple, but spun out as a separate company in its final days, before being killed by Steve Jobs shortly after his return).
It "only" sold a few thousand copies. (But it was during the warez heyday, and I am pretty sure there were also tens of thousands of bootleg copies being used, thanks to the registration code generator by "DocNZ" that was widely shared on Hotline back then.)
But that was really pretty great, since the final MP2000/2100 generation of hardware it required was thought to have only sold about 200,000 devices in total.
I have since had a fairly normal software engineer career, and have worked on apps that shipped far more copies, and today I work on customer facing web applications and API SDKs that have more users, and arguably do stuff that is more "important" (e.g. help companies manage large fleets of machines/robots/IoT stuff) than what Dash Board did — which was basically just improve the user interface of the Newton.
But it's 100% clear to me that the magnitude of user impact of Dash Board was much higher than any other thing I've built. People really loved it — I know because hundreds of them actually wrote to us to let us know. (LOL I mean wrote to me "me" — old habits of pretending the company wasn't just one student in his tiny apartment die hard).
Of course, I made more money later, and worked on things that touched a much larger number of people's lives. But "impact" has both X and Y axes. It was the depth of the users' fondness for Dash Board that makes it eclipse everything since. I don't think there are that many chances to just go for "user delight" as the number one metric.
For me, developer satisfaction is a function of that user delight more than anything else.
[1]: http://www.fivespeedsoftware.com/dashboard
[2]: 15 years later, I open-sourced the code and gave it a proper retrospective: https://github.com/masonmark/Dash-Board-for-Newton-OS
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NS Basic/Palm on Github!
The experience of resurrecting this software is similar to the odyssey of Mason Mark, detailed here.
gaseous-giganticus
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Simulating Fluids, Fire, and Smoke in Real-Time
I think the curl noise paper is from 2007: https://www.cs.ubc.ca/~rbridson/docs/bridson-siggraph2007-cu...
I've used the basic idea from that paper to make a surprisingly decent program to create gas-giant planet textures: https://github.com/smcameron/gaseous-giganticus
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Friday Post: What is something you made or solved in C that you are proud off?
Gaseous-giganticus - procedurally generates gas giant planet textures for space games, etc.
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How can I generate realistic planetary cloud cover?
This is what gaseous-giganticus uses. Combined with some other techniques, it can help with making some clouds for earthlike planets, but not in real time. Mentioned here previously. The process I use for making earthlike planets with clouds for Space Nerds in Space is described here.
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Procedural Gas Giant
Here's my own gas giant thingy, which produces (what I imagine to be) decent results, but is quite slow.
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How do i use/compile gaseous giganticus?
Hi. I'm the author of gaseous-giganticus. You do not need to apply the patch, as it was incorporated into the source already a long time ago: https://github.com/smcameron/gaseous-giganticus/commit/b3ca95f2f3975d6ca97029dae166e2daf068b3f0
- Ask HN: What is the most impactful thing you've ever built?
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Aside from hobby and practice, what are some genuinely useful personal apps?
I needed some gas giant textures for planets in my space game so I made this thing, which also ended up getting used by other people for their Kerbal Space Program mods.
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Empyrion -- Galactic Survival - #3 by pavloocheretianyi01 on DeviantArt
Is that gaseous-giganticus output that I spy?
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Best (preferably free) procedural planet texture generators
I've made a couple. For gas giants, gaseous-giganticus. For earthlike, or rocky planets, there's a program called "earthlike.c" in the space-nerds-in-space repo. Other than allowing you to supply an input image to use more or less as a color palette, they don't allow much in terms of customization, though there are quite a few knobs you can turn.
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What is your best project using C?
Most innovative thing, or what I'm most astonished I actually successfully pulled off against all odds, is probably gaseous-giganticus, which is a program that uses curl noise for procedural fluid flow(pdf) on the surface of a sphere to create cubemap textures for procedurally generated gas giant planets.
What are some alternatives?
lsblk - List information about block devices in the FreeBSD system.
ebsynth - Fast Example-based Image Synthesis and Style Transfer
side-by-side - Visual comparison of different translations of itemized texts; e.g. poems, bibles, etc.
SPH-Fluid-Simulation - A multi-threaded particle-based solver, Smoothed-Particle Hydrodynamics, for the Navier-Stokes equation
NS-Basic-for-Palm-OS - NS Basic/Palm was an implementation of BASIC for Palm OS devices. Development was done on Windows, creating apps which would execute using a Palm OS runtime.
texture - Procedural texture generation package.
automount - Simple devd(8) based automounter for FreeBSD
Noise-Extras - Noise & procedural generation code pieces that I didn't feel needed whole repos all to themselves.
chip-walo - CHIP-8 Emulator using C and SDL2.
space-nerds-in-space - Multi-player spaceship bridge simulator. Captain your starship through adventures with your friends. See https://smcameron.github.io/space-nerds-in-space
MotorMC - MotorMC is a blazing fast, multi threaded, asynchronous Minecraft server software that aims to handle many players (1000+) on a single world while still providing an experience as close to vanilla Minecraft as possible.