William Whittaker

I'm a software developer and hobbyist game developer.

My goal is to design software for people who don't want software. I don't like my computer, and if you're designing software, you shouldn't either. Of course, if you're working on Vim, this is a different situation. But if you're working on a music player, or a web browser, or an email client, you should be cognizant of the fact that your users probably don't care all that much that the new version is 5% faster and comes with new keybinds that allow you to do 10% more things without leaving the keyboard. There's a good chance they'd just like it to get out of the way.


Hummingbird

2024-    

Hummingbird is a cross-platform open-source music player designed to be fast and efficient while still adhering to modern design and usability standards. It's written in Rust, with the GPUI framework.

You can find the latest release on GitHub, as well as the source code. The latest commit is also available from CI.

boing!

2022-    

Boing is a physics-based first-person shooter - think TF2 meets Smash Bros. The idea for the game came from a night of playing Ricochet.

This project is perpetually in early stages of development, but I do plan to release it at some point. Right now, I'm waiting for Godot.

starship

2020-2025

Starship was a groupware-meets-social-networking platform that aimed to give people a place to express themselves. Users could create "planets" (groups) that had "components" (forums, wikis, blogs, etc.).

Later versions of this project planned to implement a new component system that allowed for users to create custom components using a WYSIWYG editor (think Squarespace's modern page editor, but with support for more interactivity). This was abandoned due to scope issues.

Laser Studio

2022

Laser Studio was an IDE for developing Tower Unite laser projector expressions. It provided extensive debugging tools, documentation, and a custom runtime environment for executing expressions.

This project was my first Rust project - it was left behind in favor of Starship.


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