Pointless, and poorly written, too. But shows basic technique for applet animation:
- Start a thread which updates your model,
- Call jWhatever.repaint() after each model update,
- If repainting takes too long, you’ll get more model updates than repaints. Thus is the wonder of threads.
In my Apple ][ youth this is the sort of stuff I mostly wrote: faux-data displays.
It may be pointless, but I like the aesthetic. And I got caught staring into it, playing “what’s the most intersecting circles I’ve seen so far.”
But it looks cool! I’m totally hiring you to make fake computer screens if I ever make a movie that needs them.
I couldn’t stand living without a screensaver version of this, so I ported this code to Cocoa, and produced a Mac OS X Screensaver:
http://www.red-sweater.com/blog/179/subservient-blips
Thanks for the cool code, David!
[…] I was pleased by the kind of “cheezy space film” mood David Van Brink’s pointless applet put me in, so I got the wild idea of creating a Mac OS X screen saver out of it. […]