You Can Play Flappy Bird in the Mac Finder

  • 8 April 2024
  • 2 replies
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Userlevel 7

by: Paul Horowitz

 

If you’re a longtime Mac and iPhone user, you likely remember the wildly popular viral iPhone game called Flappy Bird from way back in 2013, with its very challenging yet addictive gameplay. Flappy Bird was an absolutely massive hit that quickly came crashing down when the developer yanked the game from the iPhone App Store due its addictive nature and the surrounding pressures he felt as the game became a global phenomena.

Well, here we are more than a decade later, and Flappy Bird has been revived by a different developer, as “Flappy Dird”, and it’s implemented in… the MacOS Finder?!

As wild as it sounds, Flappy Dird uses AppleScript and Python to allow a Flappy Bird-like clone to play directly in the MacOS Finder, using folders, list view, custom icons, and all sorts of wizardry and creativity to recognize clicks, rapidly change the icons, and basically recreate the basic Flappy Bird gameplay within a Finder window. Cool, huh?

 

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2 replies

Userlevel 7
Badge +25

Interesting, but not really just the Finder running this.

  1. There is some  AppleScript and Python code  you need to download from a GIT repository.
  2. Then you need to be sure you have Python installed on your computer (Google it. (It is not always there by default.)
  3. And then open a terminal window and, according to the instructions, do;
    1. “Run `flap.py first-time-setup` (`flap.py` has no dependencies)’  to “set-up”  (something like ‘python3 flap.py first-time-setup’ depending on the name of your python install.) 
  4.  Then you have to make sure two of its finder Windows are sorted correctly:
    1. ( The instructions say “Open the directory `buf1` and sort the window by "Date Modified", ascending (arrow pointing up). Do the same thing with `buf2`. * The game will look really weird if you don't do this!! “)
      1. EXCEPT those two folders were empty in my case. So maybe the setup did not work. Should they contain files? Great instructions here - NOT!
  5. THEN if you can get that to work, go back to the terminal and you run:
    1. `osascript ./flappy-dird.applescript`  
    2. Except you will see a dialogue appear that looks like this: 
  6. Personally, I would not allow some script from the web to have this level of access to my files!
  7. So I RECOMMEND STOPPING HERE  and not give this code access to all your  document and data. You have been warned. 

Sorry, this is not a “Finder game of flappy bird”, but some script and python that do something I am not willing to test on my machine. If you decide to test it, let us know how it worked. 

FAIL in my opinion 

Userlevel 7
Badge +4

Erm, no thanks. Too much effort and security concerns for such a basic game

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