I was just reminded of
XPenguins,
Neko, AMOR, and all the rest, and started wondering if such desktop toys are even possible in many windowing systems. (You can try neko on
aiju.de; click the cat in the top left corner.) On the other hand, I imagine a rigorously secure window system might make implementing these things impossible, or at least difficult. So I'm wondering, are they possible/difficult/easy in many window systems? I see Neko has lots of ports.
I wasn't thinking of
Crabs, but it's definitely related. The crabs story (mostly in PDFs) covers some of the issues involved. It's entertaining too; I particularly like the bit where an artist was more offended by the violation of the laws of nature (as she understood the nature of window systems) than by what it did to her work.
I know how she felt.
