Flappy Dird: Flappy Bird Implemented in MacOS Finder

Eieio:

I made a game. It’s called Flappy Dird. It’s Flappy Bird inside MacOS Finder.

It has instructions, high score tracking, and marquee banner ads. You double-click to start a game and select any file in the window to jump. It runs at 4 frames a second and can’t run much faster. It occasionally drops inputs for reasons that you’ll understand if you finish this blog.

There are two types of hacks I just love: those that are surprisingly useful, and those that are utterly useless but completely joyful. Pretty clear which type Flappy Dird is. Even better than the game itself is the detail Eieio puts into explaining how it works, including this gem of a sentence:

I was reluctant to do this because adding any amount of control flow to an AppleScript seemed hard — but I was also pretty excited to get to say “I rewrote it in AppleScript for speed.”

★ Sunday, 17 December 2023