Last Saturday, I was updating the Ubuntu OS on my Raspberry Pi 400. While I was waiting for the updated packages to roll in (there were a lot), I opened GEdit, and started experimenting with HTML’s <canvas> element.
I’d been thinking of creating a simple algorithm to generate high resolution minimalist desktop wallpapers. Previous attempts had not yielded very nice results, but this time, the images were looking promising.
From there, things kinda snowballed…
- The next morning, I tweaked things a bit and improved the HTML and CSS code.
- Though barely presentable, I uploaded the result to my server.
- I posted the result on Hacker News.
- Half an hour later, it was on the HN front page.
- I got some great feedback in the comments section, and a couple of interesting feature requests.
- By the time I went to bed, 60K+ wallpaper had been generated.
- This morning, that number had increased to 90K, even though the HN post was now on page two.
- On Github, I found a Pull Request by Alexis Lucas that added most of the requested features.
- Also on Github, I was alerted to the native Mac app that Victor Gama created.
Developing open source can be a wonderful thing sometimes!
Fortunately, my server had no problem serving the generator around 5 times per second during the traffic peak caused by the HN post. Image generation is done client-side, so this is actually a very light web page to serve.
The wallpaper generator is both “free as in beer” and “free as in speech”, so feel free to give it a go.
