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May 25, 2005

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Cubed3W...

Cubed3W is a slowly spinning cube rendered in OpenGL on top of your desktop that allows you to display and periodically reload four webpages of your choice. This way you can easily check for new headlines on your favorite web sites.

My WebCube

As you can see, it looks pretty cool. As the cube spins, you can “grab” it and spin it faster or in different directions. Clicking on one of the sides and dragging up or down will actually scroll the page up or down as well.

A couple of drawbacks:

  • There is no way to actually access the webpages from Cube3W — which makes the application eye-candy only (it would have been nice to allow the user to open the webpage in a browser if they double-clicked on one of the sides — not to mention making the page links clickable).
  • Cubed3W pretty much takes over the desktop to run — while you can see the background in the picture there, it’s not actually clickable (probably a screen grab). If you want to bring anything to the front of Cubed3W, you have to click on the program’s icon in the Dock.
  • Cubed3W can’t be sized or minimized — I would love to be able to make it smaller and drag it to the corner of my desktop.
In any case, it was fun to add some webpages to the cube and watch them spin and update. I’ll be looking for an octagon version next.

You can download the current version of Cube3W here.

Posted at 3:02 pm

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Comments (3):
hmmm…. interesting! i wouldn’t mind having that but seems like it would be frustrating for pages with a lot of print. maybe not? its is cool, though…

dennis the menace () - May 25, 2005 at 4:27 pm

That is pretty neat-o, but I am left wondering about something. Why only four pages? We only rotate on one axis here? Probably an issue with the developer. I can see it now:

headscratch

If I use all six sides, you won’t be able to see the cool, but ultimately pointless back-side of the other pages!

Developers. Such dorks, eh? ;)

hink () (URL) - May 25, 2005 at 11:21 pm

Dennis ~ Yeah… The app is mainly for seeing when a web page changes — and to look cool. You can’t do much good reading on it.

Hink ~ That’s why I said that I’m waiting for the octagon version — or maybe even something 20-sided that is completely three-dimensionally rotatable. ;-)

timsamoff () (URL) - May 25, 2005 at 11:43 pm

  
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