Bogotá-based coder and cartographer, Olivia Jack, has been sharing some awesome sketches this week. Created with Hydra, a set of tools Jack created for live coding networked visuals, it uses streaming for routing video sources and outputs in real-time and often with hypnotic results.

We’re suckers for a bit of De-Stijl. Our own Jenn Schiffer has even previously created her own Mondrian-generator. So we were excited to see the project “marlow-moss” by former Snap and Google product manager turned software engineer, Sheridan Kates.

Wanting an excuse to play around with CSS Grid-based projects, Kates took to Glitch to recreate the works of British Constructivist artist, Marlow Moss. Moss’ use of overlapping elements made her work a great candidate for CSS Grid, and Kates clever use of clip-path CSS polygons made sure the drop shadows still looked en pointe, giving her creations the 3D feel of Moss’ original works.

Take some time to look at her art and see how it was created by viewing the source code.

Fellow fans of De-Stijl will also appreciate Jack Preston’s earlier project “de-stijl”, which enables you to create Mondrian-inspired art in your browser!

Have you been confounded by Professor Dr. David Novick’s optical illusions that have been shared across the net this week? If so, you’ll enjoy experimenting with “confetti-munker” by K-12 school teacher, Erik Nauman. Change the colors and alter the layers to explore and make your own Munker illusions.

Just as artful and mind-bending is the latest creation by Sean Catangui — “wavywavy”. He creates a cool, organic waveform effect by rotating and transforming letters as you scroll up and down the page.

You can see how the final effect was refined from his earlier experiments:

We’ve been known to appreciate an emoji or two in our time. So it’ll come as no surprise then that we’re in love with “emoji-sky”. Created by Jane Solomon and friends, it’s a fun project that generates skyscapes with emoji. And it’s the latest in a long line of remixes of Monica Dinculescu’s original project, “emoji-garden”. Keep the remixes coming!

Lastly for this week, I wanted to call out this fantastic project by Brian Peiris, “teachable-redux”. The mixed reality developer at Mozilla created his own hackable take on Google’s fab “Teachable Machine” experiment.

By removing the fancy UI he’s made a simplified version that’s easier to understand. And of course, since it’s on Glitch it’s remixable too — so you can quickly get your own version going and start playing around with the code straight away.

Hopefully, that art-filled little lot has your creative juices flowing. Get building, and let us know what you come up with. We can’t wait to see what you create! 🎏🎆

It’s an Arty Party

Did you hear? We just rolled out new improvements to our app pages and profiles, making it easier than ever to create something awesome on Glitch. Check out the variety of fun new apps we’re featuring this week!

Have a little fun with your buddies using this nifty remote airhorn app from Glitch user Paul Kinlan (@PaulKinlan). Open the airhorn to control it from another tab, or click the Cast button and control the horn from any Cast-enabled device on your network! Just don’t get in trouble!

Remember when AOL Instant Messenger had that feature that would broadcast the current song you were playing on your computer as your status? Glitch user Pamela Ocampo (@pamo) does, and she built an app that syncs your Slack status to whatever song you’re playing on Spotify.

Now all your co-workers can see that you’ve been playing “In My Feelings” for the past hour!

This simple yet colorful app from Glitch user Zac Colley (@zaccolley) utilizes p5.js to generate a series of line drawings. The result is a quilt-like display of tiles which changes every time you refresh the page.

Zac created the app after being inspired by London-based artist and educator Saskia Freeke as part of a p5.js workshop from Queer Code London, and he did a great job capturing the essence of Saskia’s design!

Try remixing this project and adding your own flair to it! ✨

Looking for some more vibrant art? Generative Crystals from software engineer Stephan Max implements the Generative Crystal Design System from IDEO.org’s Matthew Epler into an app that randomly creates hexagonal and six-pronged crystal designs. Keep refreshing the page for new designs!

Congrats! It’s a Sport Utility Vehicle!

Take the unnecessary fanfare out of revealing the gender of your baby with the latest app from Glitch user Noelle Leigh (@noelleleigh)! Click or tap the “Reveal Gender” button, and the app will tell you exactly what your new kid’s gender will be.

It’s better living through technology, and the app was released on World Emoji Day! Have a look at our round-up of other emoji-inspired apps on Glitch!

Several users have made great, immersive environments using Aframe and WebVR on Glitch, but this app by Glitch user Josh Marinacci (@joshmarinacci) takes that concept to a whole other level.

360 Workshop stitches together several 3D photos into a 360° tour — just hover over the red, yellow, or blue dots to navigate the tour. The full process is outlined on Mozilla Hacks, and it looks like a great weekend project to try. Build your own tour by remixing the project — Josh has even included some Creative Commons images for you to use!

These apps are a true testament to how the Glitch community uses their creativity to make projects that are useful, beautiful, and easily approachable. What Glitch apps should we feature next? Share them with us! 🌟

Something For Everyone

Every app on Glitch now has a beautiful, simple page to help people discover and explore useful and delightful projects.

To see what’s changed, let’s take a look at the app page for the latest creation by serial Glitch creator, Noelle Leigh: glitch.com/~emoji-gender-reveal

The page starts off with the key app details, like who made it, what it’s called and what it does, along with action buttons to view your app, view the code or remix it.

But now there’s also a live embed that shows off a preview of your app. Visitors can toggle between the code or the live app, see both, or remix it from within the embed itself. Learn more about how to embed Glitch apps on your own sites, and soon visitors will be able to create embeds on the app page too.

Of course, your readme is included beneath the embed, so you can include details about your app, along with any setup instructions or other key details you want to highlight.

Finally, at the bottom of the app page, we feature some of the other apps you’ve made. Apps that you’ve pinned on your profile page are prioritized, so you can choose which apps are shown here. They’re a great way to encourage visitors to explore your other creations.

Behind the scenes, we’ve also made some SEO improvements, with relevant metadata being exposed so it’s now easier for search engines to index your apps. They also look great when shared on social media or when saved in read-later apps like Pocket.

But it’s not just app pages which have been getting some love — we’ve been working on profile and team pages too.

You can now fully personalize your profile page directly on the page, including all the usual stuff like your avatar, display name, username, and a cover image — it’s got almost the same dimensions as a Twitter cover, so you can reuse that image if you have one. What’s more, you can leave and delete projects straight from your profile page, in addition to pinning apps to the top and undeleting apps you previously deleted.

While we can’t talk too much about Teams yet, we can let you know that both team pages and your Glitch profile just got performance enhancements making them 10x faster.

And you, yes you, can make profile pages even better too!

These performance improvements come in part from our hard work to move the community site over to using React. This not only makes it faster but also easier to understand. This is important because, in case you didn’t know, the Glitch community site is open-source! So if you’ve been wishing for an enhancement that hasn’t already been mentioned above, then you can always make them happen yourself! There are details about how to contribute and suggestions of contributions you might like to make.

We hope you like these improvements, and we can’t wait to see what you build next! 🎏🙌🏿

New App Pages and Snappier Profiles

Today is World Emoji Day, a worldwide celebration of the humble emoji and everything they represent. Starting out on Japanese mobile phones in 1999, emoji gained international appeal once they appeared on iOS and Android. Now there are emoji pillows, emoji clothing, and even an emoji movie 🤨

Emoji can have literal and figurative meanings, and plenty of users on Glitch have used emoji for all types of fun and creative projects. Let’s have a look!

Monica Dinculescu (@notwaldorf) is a self-proclaimed ‘Emojineer’ at Google, and her projects on Glitch embody the whimsical and delightful spirit that World Emoji Day is all about!

This is a perfect app for World Emoji Day — an English to emoji translator. Paste in your text, and the app will do its best to change that text into emoji.

Monica’s emoji garden isn’t just beautiful to look at it, it’s also helped inspire a number of different remixes, including an emoji desert and an emoji-filled otherworldly voidscape. What type of emoji setting can you create?

Patrick Weaver (@patrickweaver) is the Learning Design Manager at New York-based nonprofit Mouse. He builds projects that put a new emoji-fied spin on nostalgic games and services. Let’s look at some of them:

When I was a teenager, I loved making computer wallpapers. Now you can make your own wallpaper using the emoji of your choice. Put it on your laptop, your mobile phone, or whatever digital device you like!

Minesweeper is a classic video game on Microsoft Windows, and Patrick has updated it for the emoji age. Plant your flag and find the treasure.

Monica and Patrick’s apps have been remixed and enjoyed by countless users, and there are several others who have built apps in the same spirit of emoji. Here are a few we really like.

Glitch user Jackson Calloway (@jcksncllwy) built Nomoji as a way to fill your screen with cascading flows of emojis.

Two emojis enter, but only one will emerge as victorious! Glitch user Axel Freeman (@axelfreeman) pits emojis against each other in a turn-based battle to the end. Which one will reign supreme?

This app from Glitch user Mikkel Malmberg (@mikker) behaves similar to Facebook Live videos. Remix the app to add the video of your choice, and have people react to it using emojis.

These apps are just a handful of the creative and fun ways that Glitch users are incorporating emoji into their work. Happy World Emoji Day! 😄

It’s World Emoji Day! 📅🎂🎉

The days are longer and the temperatures are warmer, which makes it a perfect time to get away from the regular grind for a little rest and relaxation. Whether you’ve got a big trip planned or you’re just taking a weekend getaway, bring these apps with you for some fun with Glitch on the go!

For me, childhood road trips bring up memories of games played to pass the time. But with smartphones and handheld consoles, the days of 20 Questions and I Spy are probably long gone.

That’s where Glitch User Malte Ubl (@cramforce) and his app Road Trip come into the picture! This app uses a combination of Google Maps and Wikipedia to serve up information about places and points of interests along your trip. Even better, the app reads the information aloud to you!

In an interview with The Verge, Ubl says “I made [the app] for myself, because I frequently drive through places and was thinking it would be nice to learn more about my environment while I have nothing better to do sitting behind the steering wheel.” I’d say this app definitely accomplishes that task!

Long and short division always tripped me up as a kid in elementary school. Eventually, I learned a few mental math tricks to help me out, and one thing you quickly pick up is how multiplication and division is related. That works for the decimal number system base 10 — which is what most people use — but it gets trickier with different bases.

Thankfully, Glitch user Christian Lawson-Perfect (@christianp) has come up with a super useful app that maps out divisibility using a series of chords. Whether you’re into math or not, try adding in different positive integers for both values and see what elaborate diagrams you can create!

Every good magician needs a magic wand! Channel your inner Criss Angel with this fun app from Glitch user Natalia Wojtkowska (@titolstwo). Wave it around dramatically for your next act, or if you’re on your desktop or laptop, click and hold the wand for a little extra flair!

Animated GIFs have grown in popularity in the past few years, and so have SVGs, a vector-based file format which renders in the browser. You can perform a lot of effects with SVG files, but what about animating them?

Glitch user Tiffany Tseng (@ttseng) created SVG Animator as a way to add some motion to SVG files. Write or paste in your SVG code, change up the animation type and the output width, and export the result as an animated GIF. It’s the best of both worlds!

World Emoji Day is right around the corner, and one way we have seen people use emojis is for making other types of interesting creations, such as a garden or even a game of Tetris!

Glitch users Matt Haughey (@mathowie) and Javan Makhmali (@javan) built an app that turns text into a series of moon emoji characters. You can also copy and paste these to use on Twitter or Facebook or wherever you’d like!

Try remixing this app, using different emoji, and show us what you create!

Before GIMP, Corel PaintShop Pro, or even Adobe Photoshop, there was Microsoft Paint. It’s been around since 1985, and is still used for simple image processing tasks or just for doodling.

The spirit of this humble raster graphics editor is alive and well thanks to Glitch user Doug Valenta (@dougvalenta) and his app Remarkable Battery, a faithful and functional interpretation of Microsoft Paint completely in the browser. Draw and color anything you like, and save it as a square image up to 64x64 pixels in size.

How well do you know the people who are following you on Twitter? Put your memory to the test with twitter-quizz, a simple app from Glitch user Xavier Lepaul (@xalep) that lets you match the displayed avatar to the follower. If you have a large number of followers, keep refreshing the app for new combinations and try to get a score of 100%!

As usual, we have a grab bag of great apps created by the Glitch community. Which one did you like best? Did any of these inspire you to make something awesome? Let your imagination run wild and make the app of your dreams on Glitch!

Oh, The Places You’ll Go

Making Fun Apps, and Meaningful Change with Patrick Weaver: A Glitch Creator Profile

By day, he helps young people learn to code, but by night, he creates hit apps that have been used by thousands of people. As Learning Design Manager at Mouse, Patrick works on projects and curriculum that empowers students to create technology that solves real problems and make meaningful change.

He has a long history of working with and creating educational material for kids. This includes writing and illustrating a series of children’s books — like “The Ungrumblies”, a book about allergies — as well as others about adventures in and around New York City.

His apps on Glitch range from functional tools to fun, creative games and experiments.

Let’s take a look at some of his projects:

A colorful Minesweeper-clone made with React. You are a beachcomber on the hunt for treasure. You can dig to try to find some hints, but don’t reveal the treasure now while the beach is full!

A simple app that generates your own emoji wallpaper! Add any emojis you want to make a custom emoji wallpaper for your desktop, laptop, or mobile device.

From Spotify playlist generators to Stranger Things tributes — audio apps are always a hit on Glitch. Music is perhaps the industry that has been most transformed by technology, and it’s created a nearly insatiable appetite for ways to augment your listening experience with technology.

This is proven out by the popularity of Patrick’s Record Player app. Like a Rube Goldberg machine for music, he linked the output of the Google Cloud Vision API with Spotify’s Search API to find music based on an uploaded image of an album’s cover art. Dubbed “Shazam for album covers” by Pitchfork, his app was covered by both music and culture outlets like NME and Paste as well as tech press.

Much like Google’s Art and Culture app, Record Player is given a new dimension with selfies. By uploading a pic of yourself you can see which album Spotify thinks you look like most. So perhaps “Shazam for your face” is a better description! 😙🤳🏾

Patrick’s work typifies the positive impact apps and technology can have on people’s lives. Record Player is not just a fun mashup of APIs, but an app that bridges the gap from useful tool — like identifying an album overheard in a busy record store — to a fun way to pass the time when hanging out with friends, such as seeing whose selfie results in the best or most obscure song.

Patrick’s day job at Mouse, a national youth development nonprofit, helps create more diversity in STEM and opens up opportunities for students from under-served communities across the US.

You can learn more about Patrick on his website, follow him on Twitter, and see what he creates next on his Glitch profile.

Making Fun Apps, and Meaningful Change

Beachcomber
A colorful Minesweeper-clone made with React. You are a beachcomber on the hunt for treasure. You can dig to try to find some hints, but don’t reveal the treasure now while the beach is full!

Emoji Wallpaper
A simple app that generates your own emoji wallpaper! Add any emojis you want to make a custom emoji wallpaper for your desktop, laptop, or mobile device.

Record Player
From Spotify playlist generators to Stranger Things tributes — audio apps are always a hit on Glitch. Music is perhaps the industry that has been most transformed by technology, and it’s created a nearly insatiable appetite for ways to augment your listening experience with technology.

Fun Apps, and Meaningful Change with Patrick Weaver

The year is halfway over, and with that, many people are counting down the days to their next vacation or holiday. This week’s round-up of apps mostly share a common theme of counting so let’s kick things off in 3…2…1…🚀

Glitch user Crystal Camarao (@crystalcamarao) is a huge fan of Christmas. While she’s been busy counting down the days until the big holiday, she couldn’t find a bot that would do this for her. So she built one on Glitch!

Crystal details her process in a Medium post, but you can see the bot in action on Twitter over at @time_until_xmas. Right now, the bot updates once a day until Christmas Eve, when it then updates every 30 minutes.

On the web nowadays, it’s fairly well-known that web pages and apps are collecting data and tracking your usage on a consistent basis. And if you host a website and want to know where your users are visiting you from, then you’ve encountered referrer logs filled with these trackers. It can really throw off the numbers of which pages on your site are being visited by humans, not bots.

Glitch user Ada Rose Cannon (@adarosecannon) made a simple solution to this by spinning up her own tracker! Remix the app for yourself, make a few simple changes, and include the provided code on the websites you want to track. If you need a more complex version with real-time updating, Ada’s got you covered there as well.

Meetings can be a great time for unexpected inspiration to strike. For Rowan Merewood (@rowan-m), Glitch is his new “doodling in meetings”, and that brought forth this delightful rainbow pendulum animation!

One of the great things about Glitch is how easy it is to get started creating a project based on any idea you have. What changes would you make to this app? Try remixing it and make it your own.

Functions are one of the most fundamental tools in JavaScript, but when you’re learning to code it can be difficult to remember when to use the right function (or what to use it for). Even experienced programmers run into this issue!

Glitch user David Sharp (@davidsharp) devised a great way to illustrate how the slice(), substr() and substring() functions work, which can save you a lot of time and stress in case you get them confused. What other JavaScript functions can be easily explained by creating an app like this?

Apollo Architect and Glitch user Jake Dawkins (@JakeDawkins) likes learning, building and teaching others to do the same. His Twitter presence is a prime example of this, including a recent thread of example apps he built on Glitch answering some common questions about GraphQL!

There are several more examples, all of which use an Apollo Server playground app which you can remix and use for your own GraphQL projects. I love how Jake is using Glitch as a way to educate others while also showing off the capabilities of Apollo Server!

Our New Mini-Zine — “Understanding Webpack”!

Webpack gets millions of downloads every month, and powers tens of thousands of websites and apps. But what does Webpack actually do? And why is it useful?

We’ve just released a shiny new mini-zine on Instagram that shows you the basics of Webpack, along with a video example so you can see it in action. There’s even a remixable example app for you to work with once you’ve finished the zine.

What other mini-zines would you like to see from Glitch? Let us know!

There’s a lot going on out there in the world, and social media and our 24-hour news cycle can keep all of us anxious, stressed, and on heightened alert. Sometimes, you just need to chill out and relax, and Glitch user @MinervaArcher came up with an app that can help you ease into a state of calm.

Your Moment of Zen guides you through a simple mindful breathing exercise — just inhale and exhale along with the throbbing circle. This app is a fantastic way to use technology to solve a real world problem. Bookmark the app on your phone and use it whenever you need to feel some peace.

Whether you’re counting characters in a string, counting the pages in our new mini-zine, or counting down the days until Christmas, you’ll find the app you’re looking for on Glitch. Even better, you can build the app of your dreams with the support of a helpful and friendly community. So what will you create today? Show us what you’ve got in 3…2…1…. 👍

Every Project Counts

As we say goodbye to another week on Glitch, let’s take some time to look at some really fun apps we discovered. But first, we’ve got an announcement to make! Drumroll please! 🥁

Time flies when you’re having fun, right? Since we launched Glitch, we have seen such an outpouring of love and support from the community. And this week, we celebrated our one millionth project!

And I have to say, it’s so fitting that our one millionth project was by a freeCodeCamp student learning how to use Node.js. Their hands-on approach to teaching coding through practice, combined with the power and flexibility of Glitch is a winning combination to help people of any skill level create something awesome online!

We love A-Frame because of how simple it makes creating virtual reality experiences. There are lots of examples on Glitch for you to view and remix, and you can create something really amazing without a lot of complicated setup.

Glitch user Ada Rose Cannon (@adarosecannon) made a delightful VR scene to celebrate getting 5000 Twitter followers! Try reloading the app and see how the top lands in a different place each time. Very neat!

We’ve featured the work of the talented Monica Dinculescu (@notwaldorf) before, and her latest project is filled with the same playfulness and wit that make her a popular creator on Glitch!

Tenori-off is a music sequencer based on the popular Tenori-on music sequencer by Yamaha, and includes, drums, synth, and a metronome to control the tempo. Monica’s project also includes machine learning which tries to match drums to a synth melody that you create. Clever!

Glitch user Annaia Berry (@jarcane) might be on to something big here:

Dubbed as “a simple application for edifying oneself with the cutest of dogs”, this app is exactly as advertised — pure doggie delight at the push of a button.

But what if you want to see some different dogs? That’s where the Glitch community has your back. Check out the other variations on this app!

The Goldie Generator by @JulianKittelson-Aldred

These apps use the open-source Dog API, so you can remix any of the apps above and pull photos of dogs from Affenpischers to Yorkshire Terriers. 🐾

Customizing and creating your own character has been around since the beginning of role-playing games (or RPGs, for short). Sometimes character traits and stats are chosen from a list of preset demographics or by rolling dice (for tabletop games), and part of the fun is seeing what you can make.

Glitch user Matt Walsh (@walsh9) built a way to generate new RPG characters on the fly, including stats, abilities, spells, and even more information. There’s even a randomly created backstory for the character for a little added personality. The app was built as part of PROCJAM, a fun, friendly community of people who like getting computers to make things. And using Glitch to make those things is a win, no matter how you roll the dice!

Dynamical systems illustrate how one state develops into another state over a period of time. It’s used a lot in the fields of biomechanics and cognitive science to study the emergence of patterns of movement and behavior, respectively, but they can be applied in other fields as well.

Mathematician and Glitch user Christian Lawson-Perfect (@christianp) recently built a project in Glitch showing how dynamical systems work, and it uses green and red squares to denote on and off states. There’s also a speed control which varies the toggling of the squares. Try toggling the squares yourself and see how the behavior of the entire system changes!

Answering Stack Overflow Questions Using Glitch

Converting multiple images into a PDF may be simple if you have a program like Adobe Acrobat, but is there a way to do this using JavaScript (specifically Node.js)?

Gaurav Kandpal wondered how to accomplish this, so he took the question to Stack Overflow. Felix Fong came up with an example using Glitch, and from there, Gaurav was able to edit that into a workable solution! Even if you’re not able to get the right answer immediately, something like this can help get you on the right track to solving your problem.

We hope these examples show you just how powerful and fun it is to create the app of your dreams on Glitch! Do you know any Glitch projects that we should cover? Share them with us! 😄

One In a Million

Anil Dash is CEO of Glitch, and the host of Function, a podcast exploring how technology shapes culture and society. 

He also serves on the boards of Stack Overflow and the Data & Society Research Institute, and was formerly a contributing editor of WIRED. He’s been blogging since 1999 and won’t stop telling people about that one time he was on the Desus and Mero late-night show.

Maurice Cherry is Glitch's creative strategist.

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Function with Anil Dash

Open World is a fiction anthology podcast about how science and technology serve as a backdrop for imagining a better future, helping us envision the positive influence that science and tech can play in a real future. 

Open World is produced by Keisha "TK" Dutes and hosted by critically-acclaimed podcaster Rose Eveleth, for Glitch. By speaking to the pressing concerns of our times through love, friendship, community, compassion, and sustainability, the host will help listeners imagine new ways forward into a future that is less scary and more positive, and something we can start working on constructively.  

Open World launches weekly episodes in Spring 2020. Want to contact the show? Email youropenworld@glitch.com.

Open World

Shift Shift Forward is a podcast that showcases everything that makes Glitch the best place to create on the web. We’ll talk to some of our top creators, explore cool apps, and even hear from the people who work at Glitch!

Shift Shift Forward

Celebrating the makers, creators and coders who shine.

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