When Daniel asked me to join this project (still called Desktop Mode then), he told me to focus on fun. For a first contribution, that turned out harder than I expected. Here’s how my first piece of work went.
OpenStation turns every wp-admin screen into its own window. This caused an unwanted side effect: WordPress prints its “update available” notice on every screen, so the same nag showed up in every window I had open.
The job was to hide it inside the windows and show it once on the desktop. My first version did exactly that, as a plain toast.
It worked, but it was forgettable. So I stopped asking how to show a notification and started asking how to make someone smile when they saw it. A pile of rough ideas followed:
None of them clicked, until I remembered something about WordPress itself.
The idea
Every major WordPress release is named after a jazz musician and ships cover art styled like a vinyl sleeve (e.g. 7.0 is “Armstrong”, after Louis Armstrong). Lovely, and almost nobody sees it. So I made the notice out of it:
Same job as that first boring toast. It just spins now. If it makes someone smile the next time their site nags them to update, it did its job.