Here is an example from 1995. https://archive.org/details/desktoptoys_201911
Somehow the web got very serious lately..
My first exposure to a toy app like this was called face.com (.com was the file extension for an executable, not a domain name). It was a DOS program that made these face text characters (Code-Page-437) walk around on your text console, while you could still interact with your console. This was the late 1980s before Windows.
The were two controls (besides add/remove faces) that I can remember, one made the faces all gather together in a big clump. One made them dance in a circle wherever they were currently on the screen.
It’s a playful twist on UI customization, not about automating or filtering content but about physically “eating” it. Makes me rethink how subtle interactions can change our feeling toward the web we spend hours staring at.
My other project was about a similar question - what if our emotional life gets reduced to the emojis provided to us by facebook? This was from 2018 so AI images were very new then :) https://rybakov.com/blog/zuckerberg_emojis/
And another, more productive approach was to look at gestures available in the physical library of Sitterwerk St.Gallen and translate it to the digital world. This was before tab groups landed in the main browsers (and tbh. the implementation is still not great): https://rybakov.com/blog/open_tabs_are_cognitive_spaces/
