Split Flap Display

Split-Flap Display

A browser toy that animates your message like a vintage airport departures board — complete with (optiona) color and sound. Type, flip, export as animated GIF.

Give it a clack →

Why?

There's often two Macbooks at my desk, it's just kind of how I work. I have my day job machine, and I have my personal machine. Sometimes they're literally both in front of me, open, at the same time.

The other day I read a funny little social media thread about something called a "split flap display", also known as "those old fashioned departure boards you see at the train station or the airport." Big clacky flappy things. In the old old days we all had an alarm clock on our nightstand that did a similar thing.

You can buy a big physical one called a Vestaboard for thousands of dollars. This one developer said why do that, why not just get a big monitor and do it in software? And released a product for $199.

The another developer said, how can you sell something for $199 that can be vibe-coded in an hour? And proceeded to do exactly that, open sourcing it on github.

Neat, I thought. That sounds fun. I turned to the Macbook that wasn't doing anything, opened Claude Code, and made this.

The specific feature I wanted (and I don't know if the other one has this, I didn't look) was the ability to save your board as an animated gif. That seemed like the easiest way to share your creations on social media.

That's it, that's the story. If you're a developer reading this, check out the thread - the github links are included. But I wasn't targeting developers, I just wanted to make it available to anybody, so I threw this one together and self-hosted it so everybody can play.