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mutables. paperplanejoy.com

Field notes · a browser toy

A sheet of paper, folded into the browser.

Paper Plane is a small 3D paper airplane that lies on the bottom edge of your window and waits. Pick it up and it flies the way paper does: it glides, stalls, loops and skids along the floor. It comes two ways, as an extension for Chrome and Firefox, and as a website with a daily game, a folding school and notes that arrive by air.

Fly the real one How it’s made

Fig. 1 The plane at the bottom of this sheet is a pencil sketch you can throw: 5 g of paper and 160 cm² of wing, with real lift and drag, drawn side on. Drag it and let go; tap it in the air to loop. The real plane flies in three dimensions, on paperplanejoy.com.

§ 1 · Two airfields

One plane, flown in two places.

The same plane and the same flight model run in both. The extension is where it lives; the website is everything that doesn’t need to live in your browser.

A The extension · Chrome and Firefox

It lives at the bottom of every page you read.

An essay page with the paper plane gliding across the margin beside the text

It turns up resting on the bottom edge of whatever you have open and does nothing until you do. Then:

  • Toss it in one motion, or hold ⌘ or Ctrl to aim it like a slingshot, with dots showing where it will go.
  • Tap it mid-air for a loop. Catch your own throw before it lands.
  • Fly it yourself with the arrow keys: bank, climb, dive, boost.
  • Leave a note for a site, and the plane carries it in the next time you’re there.
  • Fold new planes on a 3D cutting mat, step by step. Papers turn up as you play: washi, a candy wrapper, origami paper.
  • Its own page keeps a diary, a line a day, and adds up how far it has flown.

B The website · paperplanejoy.com

A daily game, a folding school, and a post office.

The plane is on every page there too, so the site doubles as a try-before-you-install.

§ 2 · Specification

A toy on every page has to be very good at doing nothing.

Most of the engineering went into the quiet parts: how little it loads, where it draws, and when it gets out of the way.

On every page
A content script of about 2.5 KB. It reads your settings, and nothing else.
The plane
Three.js, injected by the background worker only into the tab you’re looking at, and only where the plane is wanted. Background tabs cost nothing.
Where it draws
The browser’s top layer: a closed shadow root inside a popover, so no page’s z-index or transform can bury it or knock it out of place.
Your clicks
Clicks and typing always go to the page. It catches the mouse only while the cursor is right on it.
At rest
It stops redrawing and checks in about eight times a second. A minute into a background tab, it hands back its WebGL context.
Manners
Start typing and it lands and keeps still. It rests instead of flying over a playing video. Off on video-call sites, hidden for fullscreen and printing, and it respects reduced motion.
Edges
The sides of the window are soft: the air thickens, so a hard throw sinks in and curls back. The floor is hard: it touches, hops after a hard hit and skids, and a steep dart sticks.
Corners
Throw it hard off a bottom corner and, after a moment, someone over there sends it back: kicked along the floor, sometimes tail first.
Scale
The same size on any screen, in any window at least 860 px tall.

§ 3 · Air mail

A note that’s sealed before it leaves your hands.

Notes by plane are written on the website and opened by anyone with the link. The site keeps them, but it can’t read them.

  1. 01 Write A short note, signed if you like.
  2. 02 Seal Encrypted in your browser and padded to 4 KB, so not even its length gives it away.
  3. 03 Send You get a link. The key rides after the #, the part of an address browsers never send to a server.
  4. 04 Land Whoever opens it sees a plane glide in, land, and unfold into your note.

Kept for 7 days, then deleted. If a note can’t be stored, the whole of it travels inside the link instead. Notes you leave for yourself in the extension never leave your computer.

§ 4 · Schedule of folds

Ten folds, four ways of flying.

Five are real designs with a history: the Nakamura lock, the Harrier, the Hammer, the bulldog dart, and Suzanne, John Collins’s plane, which held the distance record for ten years. Each folds step by step, and each flies its own way.

Floaty

Drifts down in wide, lazy loops.

  • Glider floaty, wide loops
  • Suzanne the distance record: glides on and on

Fast

Slim and quick, dead straight.

  • Dart quick and true
  • Arrow slim, fast, dead straight
  • Heavy dart goes far, sinks fast

Tricky

Tight loops, rolls easily.

  • Looper tight loops, rolls easily

Steady

Blunt nose, rarely stalls.

  • Nakamura lock steady, rarely stalls
  • Bulldog dart a blunt nose: steady and tough
  • Harrier a locked nose, pointed wings: steady and quick
  • Hammer a snub nose, long slim wings: flies far and true

§ 5 · Privacy

It looks at where things are, never at what they say.

What it looks at

  • The size of the window.
  • Whether a bar is pinned along the bottom edge, so it can rest on top of it.
  • Whether a big video is playing.
  • That a key was pressed in a field, so it can keep still. Not which key.

What it never looks at

  • What any text says.
  • What an image shows.
  • What you type.

The extension has no analytics and sends nothing to any server: your records and notes stay on your computer, and your settings travel only through your own browser profile, if you use sync. No accounts, no ads. The website counts visits anonymously, with no cookies. The full privacy policy.

Go on. Throw one.

It’s free. The plane on paperplanejoy.com is the one you’d install, so you can try it there first, then add it to Chrome or Firefox.

Go to paperplanejoy.com