Pulsar Alternatives

pulsar reviews and mentions

• A simple 16x16 dot animation from simple math rules
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 May 2025

  Tixy is amazing! I built something very similar:

  https://muffinman.io/pulsar/

  I wanted to create animations for my LED matrix screen, and I couldn’t find tixy anywhere. Only after I built pulsar I found it again.

  Another similar project is https://sliderland.blinry.org/ which uses HTML sliders.

  Fun stuff!

• Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
  62 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Oct 2024

  I love creative coding. I'm mostly focused on the visual stuff, especially generating vector files for pen-plotting. That said, I'm very proud of Rayven, my small vector 3D engine that mimics hand hatching:

  https://muffinman.io/blog/sneak-peek-of-rayven/

  I would say it is 80% done, but it needs to be polished for a public release. I do plan to release it, and I would love to prepare a proper talk about it.

  There are also other small tools I created, like Pulsar (micro creative coding playground) and Vertigo (turning raster images to SVGs). Both are open source and available here:

  https://muffinman.io/pulsar/

• Pulsar, micro creative coding playground
  9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Sep 2024

  I mean, it is still easy to work around that because `f.constructor` is just `f['const'+'ructor']` and so on. Backslash was just a cheap way to avoid the exact pattern and it will be hard to fix them with a disallowed word list. For example, you may disallow string literals but then template string literals can be used: `const${``}ructor`, and some interesting code would be disallowed over the course. Literals fully disallowed, it is still possible to construct a string "constructor" without them, as the good old JSFuck [1] demonstrates. Disallowing brackets is almost sufficient, but your global worker scope is still exposed and that may be exploitable.

  After some search, it seems that using a null-origin seems the best approach you can use for now. Figma successfully used it in the production [2] and the only reason they switched was that no state can be ever shared, which is not a big problem for your case. They also tried the Realms shim for the aforementioned proposal but it seems to have a known vulnerability. And I guess you don't want to ship a WebAssembly JS interpreter ;-)<p>Anyway, sorry to bother you; it is hard to balance the fun and robustness at once. As a parting gift, the following is a genuine code that renders a 7-segment counter: <a href="https://muffinman.io/pulsar/?grid=classic&animate=opacity&code=KGFicyh4KTw1KSooMS10JTEpKiouMyooKGMsZCk9PmMmMSZ%252BKGMrMT8yNjg2NTY3MjErKGQ8NSkqMTgwMjY4ODUxPj5kJTUqNitjLzI6ZD09MikpKCh5PjQpLTUqKHg%252BMikrKHk%252BMCktKHk8MCkrNSooeDwtMiktKHk8LTQpKzUsdCUxMHwwKQ%253D%253D" rel="nofollow">https://muffinman.io/pulsar/?grid=classic&animate=opacity&co...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://jsfuck.com/" rel="nofollow">https://jsfuck.com/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.figma.com/blog/how-we-built-the-figma-plugin-system/#attempt-1-the-iframe-sandbox-approach" rel="nofollow">https://www.figma.com/blog/how-we-built-the-figma-plugin-sys...</a>

• Show HN: Pulsar – Micro creative coding playground
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Jan 2024
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Dec 2023

  Hey everyone, here is a small project that truly brings me joy. It allows you to create and share animations using code. Instead of me explaining, please try playing with it. If it doesn't click right away, consider going through a tutorial.

  Pulsar is inspired by something I came across on HN a while ago. Unable to find it again, I decided to create my own version. I swear, only after finishing Pulsar I managed to find it again [1].

  As a bonus, I wanted to run these animations on my DIY LED frame. Check out the video:

  https://github.com/Stanko/pulsar/tree/dev#led-retro-frame

  I intended to write a blog post before sharing it on HN, but that is taking forever. So, I'll just give you a few technical details:

  It is built in TypeScript and is open source. User code is executed in a web worker to minimize the risk of malicious use. I'm proud of the solution, and I find it quite nifty. Initially, I used to render it as an SVG, but in order to create GIFs for the frame, I switched to canvas. SVG gave me a few headaches which I'll cover in a blog post (if I ever write one). The syntax highlighter is a trick I found on Stack Overflow. The textarea is transparent, and as you type in it, the code is highlighted and placed into a div which lays on top of the textarea.

  So, that is Pulsar. I hope it will be as fun for you as it is for me. Let me know what you think.

  And here is a simple animation of a Christmas tree, happy holidays!

  https://muffinman.io/pulsar/?grid=classic&animate=both&code=...

  [1] https://tixy.land/

• A note from our sponsor - SurveyJS
  surveyjs.io | 18 May 2025

  Add the SurveyJS white-label form builder to your JavaScript app (React/Angular/Vue3). Build complex JSON forms without coding. Fully customizable, works with any backend, perfect for data-heavy apps. Learn more. Learn more →