Xsnow: history

In 1984, my colleague Rick Jansen created an application for the Apple Macintosh computer, called, if I remember well: snow. This application animated snow on the desktop, including snowflakes, fallen snow and even Santa flying through the air.

Later on Rick acquired a real system, a Silicon Graphics workstation, and soon he produced a version of snow that could run in an X11 environment: xsnow, first released in 1993.

This version shows fallen snow not only at the bottom if the desktop, but also on windows. (Maybe the Macintosh version did this also, difficult to verify now). More information, including links to other implementations, is available on Wikipedia. Rick is still working on snow for the Mac, the program is baptized iSnow. It appears that much eye candy has been added in due time. One could almost be temped to acquire an Apple system to run iSnow!

And then, there is even a shareware version, winsnow, that runs on MS Windows.

It seems that xsnow was received well by the community, despite the fact that is was not released in the Public Domain :-(. When you look for xsnow on the WWW, you will find complaints that xsnow does not function well on modern desktops like Gnome and KDE. It seems that there was a solution for KDE, but I found that that solution does not works any more. In Debian, under non-free, xsnow is still offered (version 1.42), but it only works on 'simple' window managers like FVWM that use the root window to place the windows. When you start this version of xsnow, in general you see nothing, because it is snowing behind the desktop.

Towards Gnome xsnow

I waited some years for somebody to solve the snowing-but-not-visible issue, but alas, no solution was provided. So, after almost finishing my findent project, I decided to have a look, in November or December 2018. Before Christmas 2018, I had something running. I let Rick know, and he was very pleased, he said. I succeeded to polish xsnow further and was able to offer a dependable version months before Christmas 2019.

Evolution

Xsnow has old roots and is adapting to new environments, visible in the code, which is a good thing for an application like xsnow. For example, there is no convention whatsoever for the naming of variables and functions. Something like 'windonfallensnow' can be spelled like: 'windonfallensnow', 'wind_on_fallen_snow', 'WindOnFallenSnow', WOFS and so on. The language used is C, (not C++ as would be the obvious choice now, however: see 'Technical issues' (no, not Python or Ruby: we really need some performance)), with many global variables, sometimes with not very helpful names. .

The choice whether a function and accompanying header files are placed is separate files or in xsnow.c, is based on the moment of the day, or the flipping of a coin. Xsnow-1.42 hardly used floating point arithmetic, xsnow-2.0 uses a mix of floating point and integer arithmetic, floating point gradually taking over. The documentation contains references to systems that are extinct for many years, but description of new flags has been noted to creep in. Xsnow's genes show traces of findent, and even of some Hitchhikers Guide.

The genes for 'toon.h' are almost gone, there are at this moment better ways to find the window to snow in. The program became aware of the fact the Santa's sleigh is pulled by 8 reindeers: Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Dunder and Blixem. Later on, Rudolf could be added.