The Handmade Essentials Jam is a programming jam where participants build simple programs they would use every day.
In the year 2026, even the basic software that comes with your operating system is a disaster. Camera apps can only record once. Calculators need a splash screen. Nobody seems to be able to reliably search your drive for files, and every app is half a gig for some reason.
But we are programmers! So this jam's topic is: rebuild an "essential" program from scratch.
The jam ends in 5 days. You can edit your submission at any time. Don't forget to share updates in #project-showcase on Discord as you go!
&fillet
I have successfully trimmed a video file to fit < 10MB, and saved that to mp4
Situation for &image-capture at the end of day 3 (yesterday I haven't had time to do anything): I think I understand the new capture API, at least generally. Those long identifiers are less scary, I have a vague idea of what some of the interfaces do. I still don't have a program that does anything useful. We Must Proceed.
Haven't been able to work as much on &kanbanvi as I was planning to, but it's starting to come together. I have basic selection and task insertion implemented, and moving is next. (don't worry the colors are temporary)
Progress on &unimap - scroll & search all the Unicode blocks (keyboard shortcut = /), click on one to view all the characters therein. Hovering a character shows its logical hex value and HTML entity. Clicking a character copies it to the system clipboard. DVUI makes this really easy with dvui.clipboardTextSet(). I was expecting to dive into Win32 by now but alas
I have animations working with clay's new transition api, and I added font scaling. Also I've never done any of these things before, I'm literally just adding things I think are useful and cool in the easiest way I know 😆 . &bind-essentials-jam
I'm joining the party with &fubar: a taskbar for macOS.
Or should I call it TaskThing? Naming is hard!
Either way, I'll hopefully learn about Apple's ecosystem and have a bar at the bottom of the screen showing open windows by next week 🙂
&bind-essentials-jam
Got a basic checkbox for my settings tab working.
Just learned that MS Paint has copilot in it smh. And the iconography is so generic now. I've decided to bring back the old charm with &osxpaint
I haven't had a ton of time to dedicate to the jam yet, but I have gotten this far in implementing Minesweeper as part of a (hopeful) suite of essential &games. Gameplay should come quickly later today when I have more time.
A lot more functionality hooked up including the, annoyingly difficult to implement, sub-diff regions. &gap
