Animated Marble

05 Feb, 2006
Posted at 12.57 PST

The Animated Marble has its origins in the Ultimate Marble desktop I released through the Graphics Factory way back in 2002. I knew at the time it would be popular, but had no idea just to what extent it would be downloaded. I was tremendously flattered to see others liked it as much as I do. Over the past two years it’s been downloaded nearly 20,000 times—and generated enough mail that I now refer to it as “that damn globe.” :-) I’m sure that doesn’t count for much in the bigger picture, but for this little dusty corner of the web, it’s impressive.

I’ve always had a fascination with spatial relationships. Maybe it comes from being left-handed in a right-handed world. But when the idea of a translucent globe came to me, I wasted little time in tracking down the resources online to pull it off. I was actually somewhat disappointed to discover several months after releasing the desktop that the World Book application included with Apple’s consumer level computers had a nifty globe viewer that allows you to do this same thing. Oh well. So much for originality. At least I conceived of the idea independently.

It didn’t take long after its release that I began receiving emails from people outside the Western hemisphere asking me to make one with a little less of a Western bias. I never did though, partly because of laziness, but mostly because I’d put a lot of effort into finding an angle of the globe that showed off all the continents. Asia’s so damn big that it completely obscures the other side of a see-through globe. And what’s the point of a see-through globe if you can’t see what’s on the other side? The only other real option is to put the Pacific front and center, but even that’s stretching it.

Then Apple released Mac OS X 10.2. It introduced a rather nice cross-fade between desktops, and I knew then that this would be a perfect subject. The task of actually creating a multi-framed
desktop put me off though. It’s not that it’s difficult—it isn’t—but that it’s boring. It’s surprised me that I haven’t run across animated desktops since 10.2 was released. It seems (to me, at least), rather obvious a thing to do. Everyone remembers flip-book animations from grade school, right?

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