Grappa is a cool thing I discovered while using the equally cool Stumbleupon.com. Grappa comes in many flavors. What is grappa? What are the flavors? They’re certainly not cherry and watermelon.

Grappa is a Java applet created by Paul Schmidinger, who has a neat site. On his site you will find several of his applets and toys that are almost as intriguing as what has become his most popular. On top of doubling as a functional way to create digital art, Grappa is just damn cool. It may just be the next Falling Sand game.

It comes in six different forms: Delayed Trace, Grappa White, Sepia, Rainbow, BlueRandom, and Galaxy Creator. Each does it’s own special thing, but all have the end result of looking awesome. You control a tracer with your mouse. This tracer follows the mouse and leaves a path. Right now in the explanation it seems as normal as Pointer trails, and it is - it’s Pointer Trails that stay where they are, and are graphics-fied. That is, they have neat physics that you can control, and they have cool lighting effects.

I would bother explaining what each one does, but you’d be better to find out for yourself. I found The original 800×300 windows too constricting for me, so I took the liberty of downloading each applet, editing the HTML, and uploading them here, giving proper credit to Paul of course. You can now play with Grappa in a 1265×860 workspace, which I have affectionately dubbed Grappa Fullscreen. Creative, no?

To have fun with Grappa, click the link on the side called "Grappa Fullscreen." There you will find links to each of the six forms of Grappa, as well as explanations of each, and links to Paul’s website.