Rubik Unbound: Reactions

Working on a project long or hard enough, I've noticed, tends to send one's objectivity about it down the drain. It's difficult to tell whether something is really good just because you have grown to like it, or whether it's a piece of junk just because you have gotten sick and tired of it. But I figured I was onto something when I gave a friend of mine a preview of this applet and his response was "That's the coolest thing I've ever seen on the web!" (OK, so his objectivity might have been a little skewed too.)

Without a doubt, Rubik Unbound is the one applet that has given me the most feedback from visiting netsurfers. It is also my most widely spread applet. At one time or other, at least a hundred different web pages have had either a copy of it or a link to it. Several Java programming handbooks have included it on sample CD-ROMs.

The attention peaked when Rubik Unbound became Gamelan's Featured Applet in the spring of 1996 and I got something like 1000 visitors a day. It still manages to attract the attention of the occasional netsurfer, though bigger and glossier applets like 3D-Blox have long since pushed it out of the limelight.