Akamaru is a simple, but fun, physics engine prototype. It's named after the super awesome ninja dog, Akamaru, from the Naruto anime and based on the article Advanced Character Physics by Thomas Jakobsen on Verlet integration.
It's not really clear if Akamaru is useful at all, but it's definitely fun. Screenshots really don't do it justice, it's all about the animation; here's a couple anyway:
Akamaru now also has a silly dock demo, which looks like this:
but again, a static screenshot doesn't really demonstrate the fun, time-sink-y aspect of the dock. I guess you just have to try it out.
I'm developing the dock on Fedora Core, but any other Linux
distribution with a recent GNOME installation should work. The dock
can be configured by dragging launchers from the GNOME menu or panel
on it. To populate the dock with a bunch of GNOME applications, run
the populate-dock.sh script. For now, the only way to
remove icons from the dock is to run something like:
$ gconftool-2 --recursive-unset /apps/kiba/launchers/2
Here's a few videos of the dock in action: google video, a DIV/X video from youmortals.com and a Quicktime version. The videos was created using xvidcap but I didn't do them myself, so I'm not sure how that tool works.
Either check out the git repository if you have git on your system:
$ git clone http://people.freedesktop.org/~krh/akamaru.git
you can then later update to a newer versions using:
$ git pull
If you make changes and want to create a patch use git
diff. See this page for more
info on git. Alternatively, download the latest version as a tarball:
akamaru.tar.gz.
In case you were wondering, yes, this web page is an
index.html file inside a git http
repository. Mind-boggling.