Why I made pondscape

I saw a tweet and it took me back to my childhood

Anish posted his axolotl pond on Twitter. You could touch the water, and the axolotls swam through it.

It took me back to my childhood. It reminded me of my elder sister's phone. It was one of the early Samsung Galaxy models, and the first touchscreen phone I ever used. Her wallpaper was a pond with fish in it. When I swiped across the screen, left or right, up or down, the water rippled under my finger and the fish moved away from it.

It wasn't a video. It reacted to me. As a kid, I thought this was the peak of human ingenuity and that nothing would ever go beyond it. Somebody had put water inside a phone and made it respond to a finger.

That memory made me want to make my own.

Once I sat down to build it, I wanted more than a pond on my own screen. I wanted anyone to be able to put one on any page, so I made it a library and called it pondscape.

If you just want a pond on your own page, you're welcome to use pondscape as it is. It's open source, and adding it to a page takes one function call.

npm install pondscape

import { createPond } from "pondscape";
createPond(document.querySelector("canvas"));