Holiday Break Projects: Crafting Games, Automating Macs, and Smart File Management

Holiday breaks often provide a unique opportunity to dive into personal tech projects, ranging from collaborative family fun to sophisticated productivity tools. This recent period saw developers tackling a variety of innovative builds, showcasing ingenuity, practical problem-solving, and a focus on user experience.

Crafting Games with Family

One inspiring project was "Kirby Sky Jumpers," a 2-player jumping game built using vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Developed collaboratively with two children, the project served as a fantastic example of kid-driven design. The children were actively involved in designing characters and playtesting, leading to iterative improvements in cloud bounce physics, tie screens, and bomb counts. This approach highlights how involving end-users, especially young ones, can make development a more engaging and enjoyable process.

Advanced Mac Automation

For those looking to streamline their workflows, a developer is building a Mac application to automate frequent and complex actions. While basic tasks like opening URLs or multiple applications can be handled with AppleScript, more advanced needs—such as copying the last error stack trace from a browser or switching to a specific terminal tab within an IDE—present greater challenges. The community offered valuable suggestions for these intricate automation tasks, including:

Playwright: A powerful browser automation library.
Vibium: A tool for desktop automation that might interface with applications more deeply.
Hammerspoon: A versatile desktop automation tool for macOS that allows scripting interactions with the system and applications using Lua.

These tools could be instrumental in creating a robust voice-controlled assistant capable of executing complex multi-application commands without relying on large language models for execution.

Intelligent and Private File Organization

File management received a significant upgrade with Floxtop, a native Mac application designed to intelligently organize files. This tool operates entirely on the user's Mac, ensuring privacy by keeping all data local. It's capable of understanding file content across 50 languages, including OCR for images, and processing various document types like PDFs, Office files, and Markdown.

Floxtop's key innovation lies in its user-centric approach: instead of automatically moving files, users define categories and target folders. When unsorted files are introduced, Floxtop analyzes them and suggests up to five most likely destinations, ordered by confidence. The crucial aspect is that files are never moved automatically; the user always reviews the suggestions and makes the final decision, empowering them with control over their digital organization.

Community and Productivity Tools

Other projects included a manually curated catalog of video games developed by the community, aiming to create a central hub for indie game discovery. Another developer focused on team health with Sentialytics, a tool designed to provide a 30-second weekly pulse on sentiment and operational friction, emphasizing frequency over exhaustive depth in tracking team well-being.

While many engaged in building, it's also worth noting that some embraced the break simply for relaxation, a reminder of the importance of downtime.