From the workshop
Notes from building Fleawinder: Living Circus: a tiny world of performers, places, and the odd things they remember.
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For a while, the website was still presenting Fleawinder: Living Circus like the old desktop strip: a row of acts above a taskbar, powered by everyday input. That is true history, and I am fond of it. But it is no lon...
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Creating a flea was never meant to stop at choosing an act, a color, and a hat. A character becomes easier to care about when they have somewhere to go after the applause. That is why the habitat work became a real sy...
Read noteThe Living Route began with a refusal: I did not want to add a World tab that was only another list of systems. If the circus was going to have places, those places needed to suggest distance, weather, routine, and th...
Read noteA living circus needs a way to remember public life without turning every private moment into content. That was the reason for the Daily Flea: not a feed, not a notification machine, but a tiny newsroom with reporters...
Read notePutting a circus in a room creates an obvious temptation: make it huge. The better answer for Fleawinder: Living Circus was the opposite. The spatial stage works when it feels like a tiny performance has quietly arriv...
Read noteThis month I spent time on a quieter kind of magic: helping each flea feel more like a tiny performer with a point of view. The goal was not to make the circus louder or more complicated. It was to make the moments be...
Read notev1.4.0 is the biggest content release since 1.0. Fleawinder: Living Circus is no longer just a watch-and-delight desktop companion — it's a game. You can create your own flea, discover your circus calling through a pe...
Read noteFleawinder: Living Circus now runs on Apple TV. The same eight acts — Nova on the tightrope, Zing on the trapeze, Rex in the cannon, Pip at the weights, Dot on the unicycle, Fizz juggling, Blaze breathing fire, and Bu...
Read noteFleawinder: Living Circus now has a custom iOS keyboard. Install it once and every app you type in — Messages, Notes, Safari, anywhere — quietly winds the circus in the background. Every ten keystrokes sends a burst o...
Read noteFleawinder: Living Circus was designed for a wide, thin strip above the taskbar — comfortably landscape. Phones are portrait. Making the circus work on small screens meant rethinking the layout without losing what mak...
Read noteThis week was all about visual depth. Each flea in the colony now wears a unique costume — Nova has a parasol on the tightrope, Rex wears a helmet in the cannon, Blaze gets a crown for the fire-breathing act. Small de...
Read noteVersion 1.1.0 adds the Juggling Act and Fire Breather to the roster, bringing the total to seven live circus acts. Both run on the same energy system that drives the rest of the show — your keystrokes, mouse movements...
Read noteFleawinder: Living Circus’s history page documents over four hundred years of real flea circuses — from Robert Hooke’s microscope sketches in 1665 to the Oktoberfest performers still working today. Writing it meant re...
Read noteI wanted something that made the computer feel alive — not in a distracting way, but as a quiet companion that responds to your presence. Most screensavers activate when you leave; Fleawinder: Living Circus activates...
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