Butterflies

A widget that flies. A butterfly flutters over your screen with no card around it: wings beating, on a wandering, curving path. Now and then it lands, folds its wings and rests for a few seconds with slow, lazy flaps, then takes off again. Place a few; each picks a colour of its own.

• An agent gets to work, or finishes a turn: a resting butterfly scatters, fast, away from where it sat, and a flying one dashes off.
• Click it: it scatters too.

hive plugins install @dip497/butterflies   # then add it from the toolbar's Add menu
hive ctl plugin open @dip497/butterflies        # or let an agent place it (once per butterfly)
hive ctl plugin call @dip497/butterflies scatter       # send it off; answers its colour and what it is doing

Options: colour: orange, blue, yellow, pink or green; "Its own" (the default) keeps the colour it picked when it was placed. It asks for no permissions: it hears the agents' states and turns through hive.hm, which needs none. No sound.

Under reduced motion it holds still on one frame and does not move. That needs a Hivemind that tells widgets about reduced motion (hive.reducedMotion); on an older app it keeps flying.

butterflies.svg is one sprite sheet, 8 frames of 64 px a row: for each of the five colours, a row flying (a full wing beat) and a row resting (slow flaps). Each butterfly has a dark outline with a white edge outside it, so it shows over a dark wallpaper, a light one and anything between. It is original art, drawn in code, under this repository's MIT licence.

How it was made

Built by a coding agent (Claude) from the widget contract (hive plugins new widget's brief, hive.d.ts and the Widgets guide), then checked in the app over a board of working agents. The sprite sheet was drawn by a short script, shape by shape. Its behaviour test is tests/widgets.test.ts in this repository, which runs widget.js with the same worker prelude the app uses.