Paul Makepeace's Toys: Psychle: Faq

What are all those textboxes at the bottom?

The original Psychle provides a visual feedback of the RGB (red, green, blue) components of the color of the background which was mostly for my curiosity value. The checkbox next to it will freeze the display (but not stop the psychling) so if you see a particularly attractive color you can stop it and see what the values are. Of course to be any real use you'd need to convert that back to hex for browsers. Try clicking in one of those textboxes...

On the left hand side there is a single text field where you can adjust the delay in milliseconds of each color transition. For the number you type in to take effect you need to click out of the box. A low value (25ms) makes it psychle pretty quickly although not frenetically, at least with today's browsers. The default is 100ms which is low enough for today's attention-deficient surfers to realize something is actually happening but not fast enough to be annoying. I personally like it around 400ms. A very slow value is great for wallpapers.
What do you mean, wallpapers?

If there's one toy page to be used as a desktop background, it has to be Psychle Clear :-). It's really, really cool. Two ways to do this:
1. Active Desktop: To enable Active Desktop, bring up Display Properties from the Control Panel and select the Web tab. Turn on Active Desktop with "Show web content" and then click New and enter the URL of choice. You can snarf the URL (on most systems) by right-clicking and selecting something like "Copy link". Once the background appears you can maximize it by mousing over the window near its top and selecting the left-most icon of the three at the top right.
2. Download: Another way to do it is first save the page to disk (e.g. by right-clicking on the URL and selecting something like "Save target as..."). Then, back in Display Properties, use the Browse button in the Background tab to find the file just saved. Now do this with psychle.js (see below)
That's great, but how do I change the delay if there's no textbox?!

If you're using it from the web, Psychle Clear takes a millisecond parameter after the URL like psychle_clear.html?1000 (for a pleasant one second delay). There are some others listed above although you can edit the URL line to anything you like. Or if you have it downloaded, edit the (very simple) source. This applies to Psychle 2x2 too, too to 2 (by 2)...
This is cool, and a little bit trippy. Can I copy it on my page?

You're absolutely welcome to do as you wish with the code (leaving the copyright line intact would be a nice touch). The guts of the code is stand-alone and presented as a single JavaScript file psychle.js or look at it as a text file psychle.js.txt.
OOOKKK... Then what do I do?

To activate it, make sure you include the file(!) with a <script src="psychle.js"></script> tag and then inside the <body> call the psychle_start(self.document, 500) function passing the document (<body>) object of the page you want to psychle plus a delay value in milliseconds. If, in the <body>, you create a psychle_track form, the program will update the psychle_track_r etc values. To change the delay call the psychle_delay(100) function. Please check out the psychle.html source code for a live example.
OOOKKK... Then what do I do?

Man, I can't live your life for you. I barely have one of my own. Hey, if you're in Monterey, how about a beer? :-)
Definitely, then you can tell me what that simple mathematical function is.

OK, but here's a hint: it's just three sine waves with co-prime periods. The overall time before a repeat is four hours with the 100ms delay.
Teach me a weird JavaScript trick!

There are even more strange shenanigans in psychle_2x2.html source code illustrating how to share objects across pages. Look in the psychle.js's psychle_start() function for how it checks the presence of a variable lurking in a frameset, and sundry sarcastic slights against JavaScript.
I have more questions and things to say!

Email or ICQ me! (and watch the spam trap on the email).

Have fun!

Psychle

FAQ