A new desktop app whose whole point is to say sorry, and to look like
saying it took effort. Nothing in it is a static bitmap.
The heart is the classic parametric heart curve, x = 16sin^3(t) and
y = 13cos(t) - 5cos(2t) - 2cos(3t) - cos(4t), precomputed as a 96-point
integer polygon normalised to a half-width of 1000 and scanline-filled at
whatever size the beat currently has it at. Even-odd crossing counting is
what keeps the notch between the lobes open. The beat is a two-thump
cardiac envelope -- a strong systolic beat and a softer echo -- and the
fill carries a vertical gradient, a soft specular highlight on the upper
lobe, and a six-layer glow. The kernel is built -mno-sse with no floating
point, so every curve, gradient, easing and physics step is integer-only
and needs no trigonometry at runtime.
Around it: three apology letters that type themselves out a character at
a time, and a slow drift of small hearts using the same fill routine.
Answering "I forgive you" brightens the heart and bursts the drift
outward; answering "Not yet" dims it, slows the beat, and starts an
honest count of how long it has been waiting. Neither answer is an exit.
Supporting changes, all of them general rather than app-specific:
- gui_desktop_request_animation_frame(), so an app can opt into
full-rate recompositing instead of the ~10 Hz live-content
heartbeat. It is renewed per paint, so it lapses by itself when the
app stops animating or its window closes.
- gui_button_styled() and gui_hitzone() in SUB-WT, letting an app with
its own palette keep the toolkit's click handling. gui_button_colored
is now a thin wrapper over the former.
- A heart glyph in the icon set.
The glow layers skip whatever the heart body is about to cover, which
cuts their blended-pixel cost by roughly 3.5x and pays for the extra
layers that turn contour rings into a smooth halo.
Verified in QEMU on x86_64: all three states driven by real clicks --
hover, forgiveness (brighter heart, burst, live typewriter) and waiting
(dimmed heart, slower beat, running counter). Builds clean on x86_64,
aarch64 and armv8i.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Fh5z6V7nGPbHvqVG5p4CXX
Turns the desktop from a fixed set of hand-drawn panels into a real
environment applications can be written against.
SUB-WT immediate-mode toolkit (gui/gui_widgets.c):
Buttons, labels, checkboxes, radios, sliders, list boxes, text fields, tab
bars, scrollbars, progress bars, sparklines and badges. An app feeds the WM
event into the toolkit and then calls widgets from its paint routine, so
each call both draws the control and reports what the user did with it --
no retained widget tree to keep in sync with window state.
Icons and dialogs:
gui_icons.c holds 14 16x16 palette-indexed glyphs stored as hex text, so the
art stays hand-editable and picks up theme changes for free; they scale by
integer factors and can be drawn as tint stencils. gui_dialog.c adds modal
info/warning/error/confirm dialogs that dim the desktop, take exclusive
input, word-wrap on spaces and report results through a callback.
Applications (gui/gui_apps_ext.c):
Settings (tabbed appearance/input/power), Task Manager (live process table
over task_find_by_pid with memory and heap gauges), Kernel Log viewer (reads
the dmesg ring, strips ANSI, colours by severity, scrolls), KTest Runner
(drives the in-kernel suites and reports 21/21 with timing), Clock & Calendar
(Zeller's congruence month grid) and a Text Editor.
Window manager (gui/gui_wm.c):
Minimize/maximize/restore buttons, a corner resize grip, edge snapping, tile
and cascade layouts, F5-F9 shortcuts, title truncation, and index-based
enumeration so the taskbar no longer assumes window ids stay dense.
Desktop shell (gui/gui_desktop.c):
Launcher icon grid, richer start menu, right-click context menu, taskbar
buttons that minimize and restore, and a live CPU trace in the tray.
Two interaction bugs fixed along the way:
- keyboard_get_key() blocks until a key arrives, so calling it every frame
froze the compositor; it is now gated on keyboard_has_key(), and stale
console input is drained before the first frame.
- When the desktop consumed a click, the WM's press-edge detector kept the
pre-press state and read the still-held button as a fresh press on the
next frame, stealing focus from whatever the click had just opened.
gui_wm_sync_button_state() keeps the two layers in step.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01L5yKJT4Wo2cV3rfPrwY5MP
