Discussion summary
A project involving Mr. Baby Paint and cellular automata received positive feedback for its creativity and charm. Users discussed its potential applications and related cellular automata concepts.
What the discussion says
- Users praised the project's creativity and visual appeal.
- Some suggested applications like designing posters.
- References were made to related automata systems like MNCA and Lenia.
“Now this is personal computing done right!”
“BEAUTIFUL WORK!!!!!”
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- Hacker News
- This is a very enjoyable read, what a great project!by drbscl
- What a wonderful looking piece of software :) My child is far past toddler age but I shall keep this in mind as a gift for friends of mine that are about to have children.
- My parents had me setup on an old MacBook when I was about 1, It was an application called "babysmash" or something. It would pop up shapes and noises as you hit the keyboard. I have no memory of this, there's just a picture of me at a laptop in a high-chair.by fennec-posix
- AlphaBaby ?
- A friend of mine made a program like that for his kid: https://deftware.itch.io/newbietimeby reassembled
- Looks great! A similar (alphabet-centric) program with even more limited/robust operation is AlphaBaby: https://www.littlepotatosoftware.com/products/AlphaBaby-maco...by kryptoncalm
- Those font tests are cool, he's created a unique way of rendering fonts, an interesting, playful look. And great that he's letting his son play with the computer.by edg5000
- I spy a Model m keyboard and a 17” crt compaq monitor
OP you’re amazing. It’s nice to see kids today can grow up to exposed to the same hardware I’m assuming you (well, me too, so us) grew up with!
by rootsudo - Good Lord what is happening in there?
These screenshots look awesome. Definitely checking this one out. Thanks for this!
- It's hard to believe how spot-on this is to what I've been looking for. I thought about coding something almost exactly like this, for the exact same reasons as the author describes.
I see this is from earlier in the year; I've certainly googled for this kind of thing a few times since then, and never got this as a result.
Thanks OP for posting.
by gota - So I got it yesterday, and the toddler loves it. He's not quite there yet with controlling even the mouse movement, but I could already see some progress in his familiarity with it from the first session. Of course banging on the keyboard at full strength is still his preferred move, but that's fine.
I'll be gifting this to a few parents I know. @jfil let me know if there's a better way than to do N gift purchases. I'm worried my credit card provider might take issue with repeated purchases (hopefully not)
by gota - The app is true marking of a genius maker. A blank space app where all the interface elements and interactions and ideas are made from scratch. There's a George Lukas like "world building" in it, the blog, the website that is just so nice to watch. One of those things you hardly see in any new product/project/... these days. I loved this.by pmkary
- Maker here. Just found this thread... Thank you so much for your nice words! :)
- This might be the coolest site on the Internet. What an awesome paint program and what a great write up. I wish there was more of this sort of thing in the world.
I love the "show source" toggle!
by xyzzy_plugh - the show source toggle is using https://blog.glyphdrawing.club/font-with-built-in-syntax-hig... (and the author is infact the creator of it)by mbo
- I made this, thank you so much for your kind words!
The show source toggle is shamelessly stolen from another awesome blog, https://garten.salat.dev/
- Using the pattern on the top left of the array of patterns I clicked several times and got a setup where it was still flood filling after maybe 10 minutes.
Unlike all the other times I'd tried where it quickly ended up with black or white dominating and then filling the whole area (except once when it became all white except for a single black pixel) this ended up with the whole area filled with a checkerboard pattern except for a jagged fault line running from top to bottom. The waves of filling would cause small changes to the fault line, and occasionally a small island of black or white would form and then be taken over by the checkerboard.
I was going to let it go for a lot longer but accidentally did the "back" gesture on my mouse bringing me back here. I've tried several times since then but that is the only time I got something that was long running.
Anyone else get any interesting long running ones?
by tzs - I found one that looks like it is periodic and so will run forever. See first image here [1].
This evolved from clicking using the pattern that is 3rd from the left on the top row. In chess notation it is the one black on c1, e1, and d5.
The darker areas appear to move down and right, with new ones coming on the left as the olds ones disappear off the right and bottom.
It is at least a little bit resistant to damage. I accidentally clicked in the middle of the lighter region messing up the regular pattern there. That persisted for just a few steps and then was absorbed into the regular pattern.
This could really use a way to slow it down or single step it to see what is going on.
Oh cool. I tried clicking a few more times to introduce several anomalies. It seemed to absorb them but with a change in pattern, so that it had 3 diagonal stripes that no longer seemed to move, but the two outer ones were cycling through some fixed patterns, and the middle one had some diagonal lines that appeared to move through it. I don't think it was quite repeating. And then it just stopped.
I thought maybe it crashed, but I clicked inside again, and it filled from that click, so it is still running. It just finished all its filling. It now has 3 regions: (1) a large solid color that if I click in there changes between black and white. (2) a dark grey region that if clicked in results in small black or white triangles, which can be grown by clicking in them again. It effectively dampens that damage so it does not spread far. (3) A region full of squiggly lines. Clicking there either just messes up a couple pixels or it infects one of the squiggly lines turning it into a black bar. See second image here [1].
by tzs - People who grow up using these sorts of bespoke software are gonna have some pretty weird nostalgia. "Hey when you were a toddler did you ever play with a paint app where the fill tool created flashing swirly patterns? ...no?"by fwipsy
- The best one for me is Mario Paint on SNES!by hiyfsch
- I think we're well past the point where anyone is feeling that level of nostalgia for software.
Unless they are explicitly reminded (immediately ruining any sentiment other than indifference), they're more likely to find closure mistaking it for something else.
We just saw this play out over the last 20 years with meme pollution.
by sublinear - I spent my whole childhood trying to find someone who played Defender of the Crown and never found one :(
- On the subject of nostalgic paint apps, I distinctly remember one of the Kid Pix drawing tools/games that I had growing up... what a weird piece of software that was!by BalinKing
- Reminds me of the Nanny Lynn tapes that everyone was wondering what the hell it was about for a while like it was some kind of analogue horror thing and then it turned out to be just some cartoon someone made for their grandkids or somethingby jamal-kumar
- I have a friend who's dad is a good carpenter, put a whole second story on his house, did the flooring and made a lot of furniture. He said it was about 4th grade before he found out that there were stores where people went and bought furniture instead of just making their own.by scrame