hyperbin watches your Trash or Recycle Bin as it fills up. Too full? It draws flies, ooze, or tentacles over it. The fuller it gets, the nastier it becomes. Free for Mac and Windows.
How it works:
- Finding the bin. Mac: the Dock's Accessibility tree, read fast enough to follow magnification. Windows: documented shell COM (IFolderView2). Nothing injected into the Dock or Explorer.
- Drawing. A click-through window over the icon. C++ and Qt 6. Ooze and tentacles are real-time 3D (Qt Quick 3D); the flies are a steering swarm.
- Cost. Nothing runs when the bin is empty or hidden. Animating, on an M4 Max: 10–20% of one core, about half in Low Power Mode. Numbers and method: https://github.com/hypernuclear/hyperbin/blob/main/docs/batt...
- Permissions. Mac: Accessibility and Full Disk Access. Windows: none.
- Analytics. Off by default.
- License. Source MIT; the builds are GPLv3 because of Qt Quick 3D.
The hardest (and most fun?) part to build was the tentacles. Each arm is a 16-joint chain solved with FABRIK (inverse kinematics) every frame. FABRIK alone looked dead, and it would happily fold an arm back through itself, so I added a bend limit per joint, a traveling sine wave on top, and a stronger tip damping so it arrives late and the arm has follow-through. Joints get pushed out of the bin's body, so an arm goes over the rim instead of through it. The joints go to the GPU as a texture, and a vertex shader bends one static, unrigged mesh along them: one draw call per arm. Up to three arms slap, coil, wrap around the bin, roll up, and reach for your cursor. I got the approach from Smitner-Studio's tentacle-arm-showcase, a 2D Godot demo. The time I spent modeling them by hand in Blender was 100% worth it.
I also made a little Halloween horror movie for it. It's at the top of the page, and the Dock shots in it are the real app.
I'd love to hear where it breaks: side Docks, multiple displays, Windows setups I haven't tried. Also, whether the ooze's eyes following your cursor is charming or creepy.