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http://www.sweetcode.org/ is a catalog of innovative free software. no longer updated but still browse-worthy.

There used to be a site for exactly this sort of thing called sweetcode, but the wankers have stopped updating...

Still, even if the stuff is over a year old, it's still interesting...

Well, this isn't really a 'console'-specific question ... or actually, it really is ... but what about apps that can do graphics straight to the framebuffer?

I don't remember what its called, but a few years ago there was a Terminal app that you could 'cat *.jpg' to and it would display those jpegs inline, with the text console, integrated like. I really liked that.

Then there was another "XMLTerm" app, (was that its name, actually?) that could handle HTML and XML docs, displaying stuff in the console/text buffer using SVGALib and such. That had promise.

I remember the hard-core terminal days - hazeltine 1500's baby! - that could do graphics as well as text 'in' the console. I always liked that - like you could do a graph just by 'catting' the raw file straight to your terminal. X came along, and made all that redundant, but it seems to me that in this day of 1024x768 Framebuffer support, it could make for some truly interesting 'hollywood' style graphics systems... if only there was interest in all that again.

Personally, I don't need a window manager (though I'm happy to use one if its available). Think I'm gonna go and see if I can find that XMLTerm thing ... maybe Sweetcode has it ... lessee ...

Keep in mind that innovation is treacherous ground: most innovative software won't find a significant usage niche. Reality has a way of turning neat research ideas into stupid user frustrations. This is not to critize efforts like Dashboard and Gnome Storage, but it's a given that you have to go through a lot of bad ideas to get the really good ideas. Just take Microsoft Word: the product that gave us both Clippy [bad!], and background spellchecking [good!].

Sweetcode

Hasn't been updated in awhile but has the best of the true innovation going on out there.

If you really feel you need to do something original, you could as well not install at all, or use Zero Install (Covered on Sweetcode recently).

But in general (if you are not running under an interpreter or emulation layer) all applications should install in a compatible way on any system, even when that is quite different from a system to another. So on Unix install in a reloctable directory tree with /usr/local/ as default (bin/, lib/, man/ etc/ etc.), and provide packages for distributions.

The usual way to do that is to prepare make targets (such as "make debian" and "make redhat" and use the defualt packaging system everywhere. Not that I would know how to do that on Windows...

You will have to distribute sources or build it yourself on each platform, and that represents the real problem. Getting the make targets right is the easy part - many free software applications contain that, and all distributions come with nice examples.

(Besides, Debian's Package Builder makes for an excellent multiarchitecture (11!) compilation cluster and should be a good reason to provide and mantain debian packages.)

Come on, the timecube guy is obviously a master at modern UI deign and html layout. :-)

Seriously though, here are some sites whose design I like:

Sweetcode

Mathworld

openrbl.org

perldoc

Paul Borke's website

the Joel On Software forums

the Tech Report (a debatable choice, but the best of its type)

Dmitry's Design Lab

From their site...

what is sweetcode?
Sweetcode reports innovative free software. "Innovative" means that the software reported here isn't just a clone of something else or a minor add-on to something else or a port of something else or yet another implementation of a widely recognized concept. (These are all perfectly fine and useful things, they're just not what this site is for.) "Free software" means "as in speech". Software reported on sweetcode should surprise you in some interesting way. "I didn't know you could do that" or "I never thought about that problem that way" or "What a strange way to do things".

This is not an all-encompassing directory, a project hosting service, a site for news in general, or a resource for community discussion. We don't report project updates (unless there's a previously unreported major new innovation); if you see something you like and want to track its progress, you should use the available tools on Freshmeat or Sourceforge for doing so.

We're unlikely to report anything that shows up on Slashdot, NTK or other ridiculously popular sites which everyone reads already. Finally, this should be obvious, but the projects reported here are generally not affiliated with sweetcode. We just link 'em.

I'd like to put forward this Turing machine, implemented using the rules of Conway's game of Life. It astounded me when I first saw it, and it astounds me still. Have a look at some of the components using the provided applet. If you've ever played with Life, you'll know how hard it is to create anything non-random at all.

Sweetcode often has interesting pieces of programming too.

I really like it when /. posts stuff that's "just cool". Politics and religion are one thing. Cool code that someone wrote just coz is another thing entirely. Really makes my weekend to find stuff like this!

Celestia is fantastic.

X-Plane, also (if you can get it all together and all running), is really great. I'd love to see the two merge, somehow, heh heh ... great for us armchair (or, in my case, tiBook) astronauts.

Incidentally, if you like 'odd software thats just cool for being cool' then you ought to know about sweetcode.org ... so many gems on this site.

there is only so many times in a day you can "go make coffee" or "check your email".

Geek Slack List

• http://www.subgenius.com/
• http://www.slackersguild.com/
• BBC News
• http://www.memepool.com/
• http://www.plastic.com/
• http://www.arstechnica.com/
• http://www.metafilter.com/
• http://www.techdirt.com/
• http://www.bottomquark.com/ (Science News)
• http://newsforge.com/
• http://www.theregister.co.uk/
• http://www.anandtech.com/
• http://www.bjorn3d.com/
• http://cellar.org - Image of the Day
• http://www.collegehumor.com/
• http://www.everything2.com/
• http://www.kuro5hin.org/
• http://www.theonion.com/
• NASA - Astronomy Picutre of the Day
• http://www.majorgeeks.com - Windows Shareware / Freeware
• http://www.advogato.org/
• http://www.sweetcode.org/
• http://www.disinfo.com/ - Disinformation
• http://www.somethingawful.com/
• http://www.astronomynow.com/ - Astronomy News
• http://www.aip.org/ - American Institue of Physics - News
• http://www.adequacy.org/

• The Effects of Moore's Law and Slacking 1 on Large Computations

Hope this helps =)

This was on Sweetcode months ago.

I am not sure I would consider searching for buffer overflows the work of "hard core computer guys". Hard core computer guys are people who write interesting software, and advance the state of the art. These guys spend their time griping about how crap Microsoft is, and how 31337 they are, all while bickering amongst themselves like 13 year old schoolgirls.

I've met Dan Egnor, and this isn't the only cool thing he's done. He's the author of Iocaine powder, the world champion rock-paper-scissors program. He's also the proprieter of sweetcode a web log devoted to innovative open source projects (i.e. projects that don't just clone or tweak existing software.) But his best hack (not described on line, as far as I know) is a version of Pac Man that runs on a PDA and uses a GPS for a user interface -- if you run around an open field carrying the GPS+PDA, the pacman correspondingly runs around the maze chasing Blinky, Stinky and Dinky (or whatever their names are.)

Physics Einsteins are r-e-l-a-t-i-v-e-l-y cheap (das ist die Relativitaetstheorie), and it is much more difficult to garner a Visual Basic AI Einstein or a Java Robot AI Mind Einstein. So how do we motivate the extremely rare AI Einsteins? Here is how.

We whisper sweetly here on Slashdot the tide-in-the-affairs-of-men call for Your Majesty the Great and Skillful Coder to join in the distributed, speciating creation of the Robot AI Mind. The rest is history.

For a scheme to charge spammers (in resources, if not in money), check a recent link from sweetcode. Probably 2nd or 3rd down.

This might be a temporary quirk, but right now, sweetcode.org works better.