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hi!, So for the Wonder challenge I built a glass terrarium that mirrors the actual weather outside — moss when it's cloudy, water ripples when it rains, embers when it's clear, frost when it's cold. It's grown out of a piece of driftwood, hand-blown look and all, and it's presented like a page out of a naturalist's field journal rather than another app with buttons.
The whole thing started in Wonder Chat, just describing the scene until it looked right. The shader work is honestly what sold me on Wonder — I could try a moss texture, decide it looked flat, and push for depth and color variation in one more prompt instead of starting over. Same for the water, the embers, the frost.
The idea almost stayed as "four pretty pictures you click through," which felt pointless once I said it out loud. It became a real thing once I hooked it up to live weather — now it's not decoration, it's actually checking the sky. I connected Wonder to my codebase through MCP (via Cursor) so it could pull my exported jar images straight into the working app, which saved me from manually downloading and re-uploading four separate files at 4am :0
It's small, but it's the first thing I've built in a while that I'd genuinely want to keep open on my desktop.
Loom link: https://www.loom.com/share/f2384ff523ba460d8cd7a1542bb06a65
Project link: https://app.wonder.so/siphephisiwe-nyathi/files/019f391f-a5bf-71f3-b5d2-69f65680a014
Explore on your mobile phone or laptop:-) https://terrarium-weather-app.vercel.app
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What if the best way to introduce a product was to let people play first?
I'm building aftrglo - a motion tool for designers who want their work to look good online without learning motion
The app is still in dev, so for now I made a coming soon page where people can join the waitlist
And since it's a tool for designers, I knew I didn't want a classic marketing landing page
We all know how those work
But it doesn't feel like me 🤪
So I made a tiny interactive playground instead: a halftone effect that reacts to cursor movement, with adjustable settings to play with
Because designers love interactive little things
Not being sold to
And it worked!
The waitlist is growing with people waiting for the launch (which is coming very soon) and I've also been getting sooo many messages about the effect, the interaction, and how it actually works
I'm very into openness and creative support, so no gatekeeping here
👩🏫 ✍️ Here's the breakdown:
1. In Unicorn Studio, I have a scene with the logo image on the bg (the same one I use as the Instagram avatar)
2. On top of it, there's a God Rays effect that reacts to cursor movement
3. Plus a Bloom effect to make it even more glowy (because it's aftrglo, obv)
4. After that, outside of Unicorn Studio, I added a canvas overlay with a halftone effect
So the background is a live 3D scene, and the dotted pattern on top keeps reading and redrawing it in real time
Like old newspaper print but inverted:
Where the image is darker, the dots get smaller
Where it's lighter, the dots get bigger
That's why the pattern breathes and moves in real time
Magic! ✨
Play with it and join the waitlist if you want to see what I'm building 👩🍳
aftrglo.app
Goated plugin!
congratulations
Nice work as usual! The workflow between AI generation and UI is evolving incredibly fast. Seeing crisp layouts come together like this always gets me thinking about fresh layouts for my own web builds. Great experiment
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