This was the playful way that I accepted my offer to become Khan Academy's lead mobile developer.
Check out a video (it has extensive motion effects, too—difficult to capture on video).
I'd been deliberating the difficult decision to leave Apple for months, over many hard conversations and much introspection. The night before I had promised Khan Academy an answer, I realized that a simple phone call seemed anticlimactic. So I stayed up all night to make this silly thing instead. I sent them an empty email the next morning with this code attached.
I was joining Khan Academy specifically to (try to) define the form for educational content on this rich, highly interactive medium. The whole idea is to make primers that are dynamic and immersive; where the student's involvement in the material is active; where learning happens through play and discovery, not just through listening to prescription. Elements should cry out to be touched and played with. The spirit should be one of joy and messiness.
I wanted to make something that would communicate that feeling, both as a stake in the ground, and as a self-introduction to the folks at Khan Academy who hadn't yet met me or been involved in those discussions. And, well, I only had a night, but this is what I came up with.
Want to work with me, a preeminent designer, and tons of other lovely people to define the form for educational content on interactive media? Are you an outstanding engineer or designer? We need your help: andy@andymatuschak.org.
There's currently a bug in the Xcode 6 beta that causes builds to fail for projects with special characters in them. This is one such project.