The first "Forgotten Project" (see Forgotten
CTC Projects) to be refurbished is a simple applet called CodeBounce.
It's one from class of things ("those goddamn useless applets") that
many web surfers in late 90s considered a major annoyance. Had it been
deployed by hordes of home page designers, it might have been infamous.
It was not, for better or worse. :-)
Applet (which can also be run as a command-line application, via "java
Bounce") is simple eye candy, displaying hard-coded number of elastic
bouncing balls, bumping into each other and so forth.
Now, there is nothing spectacular here, just 600 lines of trivially
simple position and velocity calculation code sprinkled with AWT code.
But it is kind of amazing that it still works as well (or poorly) as the
day it was written, come to think of that. At the time JDK 1.1 was
already mature, and that was the platform on which it was tested,
although browsers still only or mostly supported 1.0.2. And runs just as
expected on JDK 1.6, including adapting to resized main window (well, as
I said, as well as it ever did). It was also cool that even when Java
still did run slowly back then, as interpreted language, applet was
plenty fast on an antiquated Pentium 66 mhz PC and Netscape browser.
At the time I had done at least 3 other apps in Java (NetReaper,
Fractalizer/Fractlet and JiveTerm a.k.a SafeTerm, and this is by far the
simplest. But I kind of like that -- writing Java apps and applets was
refreshing: after having to write thousands of lines of C code to get
anything to show on a window, 600 lines of code for this puppy seemed
very compact indeed (although not nearly as compact as those 100 line
basic programs in C-64, but close enough, and much prettier).
So that's the part explaining "what". But more importantly, why? Why was
it written? CodeBounce project page
talks a bit about this. Basically, I wrote it as a proof-of-concept,
trying to figure out some simple animation, to be used as an Easter Egg
for a well-known and widely used commercial application. In the end,
things worked bit differently: easter egg(s) were added (go Phoenix
team!), but this particular idea wasn't used. It was simpler to use
static graphics and straight-forward linear shuffling. But writing the
thing did help in many other ways -- I hadn't used Java for almost a
year at that point (having had to work on C, C++); but going back felt
like home. So I was even more motivated to find a company that did use
Java. I did, and got hired there (company's name nowadays even reflects
their use of Java; that's the only hint I'll give). But that's another
story for another day.
Oh, and as to the Easter Eggs: sad thing is I don't even know how many
(or any?!) users know about these particular ones. Many people are
familiar with the "martian guy with laser gun". But I doubt many have
seen the "shuffling web form components". It was still cool to have
added my own "footprint on concrete", so to speak. Besides, there's at
least one other cool Easter Egg in there, which adds "eyes that follow
mouse pointer" in there, that I didn't write but knew about, and which
probably is as little known as ones I worked on.
