Retro nostalgia and why my new website looks like Window 9x (2019)
ash.ms
ash.ms
Most of the sins of the modern web can be easily undone
I would imagine something like `* { transition: none !important; animation: none !important; }` would get you pretty far right?
Not many developers explicitly add support for this, but it's included in eg bootstrap.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pref...
I would happily pay for a third party app to nuke every single damn animation if I could but Apple make it impossible (or at least that is what is claimed).
And of course this doesn't even touch on how laggy resizing many applications on macOS is (yes even on the shiny new M1 models). The Microsoft Office suite, Chrome and a whole bunch of other applications are horrible when resizing. It isn't often an issue with Apple's applications for what that's worth.
https://gist.githubusercontent.com/lexrus/081fa687d8b2475d33...
Also, Tinker Tool in OSX did that, IDK it it's still working.
Obviously not many people wish to disable everything but having the option to do so is great and something I wish macOS would let me do as there is way too much motion in macOS. Sure it was cute 15 years ago when the idea of a beautiful and fluid UI was impressive but in 2021 they annoy me or worse they make the whole system look crap when, for some reason, the animations lag.
Most of this could be easily undone, but it won't be. Rest assured that whatever is going to cause you the most pain is what will happen.
Truth is, we had knobs and switches, then typewriters which naturally transition to command line, then we had window managers which are like a desk(top) covered in papers. Then we had... well that’s all we have. I guess the next thing is AR/VR and 3D UIs but until then...
A mobile phone or tablet UI I would say is like a spiral bound pocket notebook, as compared to the proper desktop metaphor of full laptop/desktop computers.
It’s like trying to reinvent the book. It _can_ be enhanced, but most of the time it doesn’t change the overall reading experience.
Mac Command+Space search (Spotlight?) is about as good as it gets for driving a ui these days.
I have a problem with this "animations hiding delays" pattern, because it's straight-up dishonest and disrespectful. If the computer has to take time, let me know; if it doesn't, just give me the results immediately. Stop running what would be a piece of background feedback about the state of my machine through a low-pass filter!
Adding animations to software tends to make it slower (a good potential for a self-fulfilling prophecy here). Often enough, the animations are of fixed "developer's best estimate" length, and can take longer than the task itself, slowing the user down.
The whole idea behind "reducing perception of delay" seems to be borne out of paternalistic and exploitative thinking, "how to make the user feel better about our app, despite its shortcomings". Trying to make the user like you more than they should. Instead of that, why not focus on ensuring the user is maximally effective in getting maximum value out of the application - that they're not confused, and not waiting for the machine?
As for masking the delays, see below.
https://www.robinhobo.com/how-to-fix-the-borderless-window-p...
...and then of course you have the dummies like this who probably caused these idiotic trends:
https://forum.level1techs.com/t/is-it-possible-to-get-rid-of...
The real problem is the lack of configurability. You could change the window border width to anywhere from invisible to some insanely huge number on the older versions of Windows, and everyone would be happy. Now you're forced to use whatever some stupid "designer"'s idea is.
Thanks for those links - I’ll play around with those options to see if I can restore some sanity to my desktop.
I loved SGI IRIX's brutally bold borders, but those of Windows 7 are still just as good.
Jesus fucking christ, just discovered this now thanks to your comment, it does make a huge difference!
I actually noticed this when I accidentally disabled animations on a few websites I visit by disabling them at the OS level. Unfortunately the website animations actually made things easier to use, so I had to turn the painful OS animations back on to get the website animations back.
For anyone who doesn't know, the setting is in developer options on android 9 at least. There's several animation scale settings, they can be increased, decreased or turned off. Turning them all off removed the animations.
Since, we had iPhone/mobile and ML recently. I cannot think of other seemingly leaps. I might be wrong, of course, since it's all based on a feeling.
It was an awesome and horrible time.
This is a personal pet peeve that drives me nuts. Shifting content is irritating and just makes me want to avoid the site. The thing is, ads don’t HAVE to shift content - the site/app designer can account for these kinds of things with various techniques such as giving the ad area a fixed height so that when it loads it’s only filling in that dead space.
Ads that obscure content deserve a special place in hell.
A lot of folks try to do 'retro' but they screw it up by getting key details wrong... maybe the simple bezels have the wrong light angle, maybe the colors are too high a bit depth, and so on. A lot of games mix pixel sizes or use free rotation without quantizing it to the pixel grid (especially annoying!)
If you're going to take the retro route, don't cheap out on the details. Do it all the way or don't bother.
Bravo
That's quite passionate of you. I like how the OP added their own things. It's quite creative. For example, Paint has multiple themes, rendering of the undo history as a GIF, and multi-language support. I don't remember Windows 98's Paint having any of that, and it's all awesome.
So happy I am not the only one with this pet peeve. Never understood why so called retro games simply not render at a higher resolution backbuffer and then scale it down to a low-res one.
As much as I love the authenticity the site would probably be a lot less readable/usable if it exactly simulated the rendering of the original bitmap MS Sans Serif. Old bitmap font glyphs were manually drawn per-size and were generally expected to be viewed on a CRT where the inherent characteristics of the display gave a kind of ClearType-esque blurring that would be expected by font designers.
MS Sans Serif was replaced with an OpenType version of itself (now known as "Microsoft Sans Serif") in Win2k but then you have the copyright issue of redistributing it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Sans_Serif
Not suitable for blog though, IMO, but I guess better for PR.
Of course then I'll probably get complaints about the palette size, or the lack of per-scanline sprite limitations...!
> ServiceWorker script at https://ash.ms/sw.js for scope https://ash.ms/ threw an exception during script evaluation.
Edit: seems like it was uMatrix doing something, although the log didn't show anything blocked except googletagmanager.
E.g.:
- Middle clicking on a "blog post" text file opens new tab, but without the post opened.
- Middle clicking on the date of a blog posts, opens a literal html transcription of the page (wrong mime?)
- In general, I don't need another window manager, the system and the browser handle that fine.
Because when I do stuff like this, it looks so appealing to just declare a cursor in a CSS rule. Then HTML5 is all like:
* ha ha. There's a default set somewhere else in the DOM that's overriding your cursor (as in the author's website where the titlebar triggers the text edition cursor).
* ha ha. I'll show your desired cursor for the DOM element, but when you drag the element with the mouse I'm going to flicker every time the mouse beats Javascript to a location that lies outside that element's bbox.
Especially when making a UI to drag SVG rects, this gets annoying. I doubt there's a pseudo class for "this thing I am dragging right now using a mousemove event listener," but maybe I'm wrong.
Even JS has the PointerEvent so that you can encapsulate behaviors like dragging inside a single DOM element without having to set state for a parent element like body. I was hoping CSS had something analogous (though I can't currently think of how it would work).
When using Windows 95, I realized I was living inside what would have been science fiction for most of my life.
This is really solid work (kudos, Ash), but I'm an older audience who pines for a different past.
As for the terminal, use anything.
Ideally, one would boot the Apple II, type a "PR #1" to initialize the card's firmware and boot the Pi with the II as a console.
A terminal would have better fonts (the II has a 7x8 matrix) but would be limited to what the terminal's serial could do.
You can feel nostalgia for novel, just invented, futures too (in the sense of feeling a loss for not being able to go there).
What we got is a dystopian nightmare that could have been written by Charlie Stross (I know you lurk here) or William Gibson, except that the dialogues and plot are destitute of any interesting feature.
image-rendering: crisp-edges;I’ve heard half a dozen people say curve.fi has a problem for them because of the geocities-like site design
curve.fi one of the most respected and used application in its sector
It is confusing to use because of the interface, but its design is very intentional and is obviously retro nostalgia
but as far as dropping funds into it or not, the site design is completely benign in that decision making
just something to be aware of that there are a lot of older people who don't know stuff they are familiar with is retro enough to be nostalgic now
Edit: On second thought, it looks like it did one thing really well is refreshing my own personal memory of Windows 9x (personally, I've good memory of Windows 98, before I switched to Linux based desktop -- Ubuntu specifically).
Windows 7 was the best.
I had been looking for this and the closest I could found is https://www.os-js.org
One odd thing I noticed, when I navigate "back" to your site after clicking a link, sometimes the page renders HTML as text. For example. I somehow ended up on this page which just shows the page's HTML for me
The content-type in the response is text/plain
i love this song that started playing
wonder what kind of genre or sound this is called
saounds a bit like los amigos invisibles
See the series of books by Andrew Schulman for details.
At that point the system dropped into protected mode and was 32bit native operating system. However there was still 16bit DOS code and 16bit Windows code running. Windows 95 could easily be thought of as a very advanced DOS application.
I disagree with the author when he says "we didn't know better". Windows 95, as it was designed, was necessary. It had to be able to run on the hardware (and with the drivers) of machines at the time and run existing DOS and Windows 3.1 software.
"Easily"...perhaps, but not accurately. It would be like arguing that Linux is a very advanced GRUB application or that DOS was a very advanced BIOS application.
The fact remains that while DOS was an essential component for bootstrapping Windows 9x, Windows did still manage it's own memory, resources, etc independently of DOS. Sure, Windows managed it's memory in a way that was sympathetic of DOS applications (basically using DOS layouts wholesale for 16bit applications) but that was a requirement of the era. But you see similar examples of standards being used as a based (for compatibility) and then expanded upon in the Linux/UNIX world with Linux and macOS having POSIX components but support for so much more added on top.
> I disagree with the author when he says "we didn't know better"
I disagree with the author there to but for very different reasons than you. In the 90s we already had OS/2 (who's DOS emulation was so sophisticated that it could run Windows 3.1). Not to mention a whole boat load of better home computers than IBM-clones, such as Acorn Archimedes, Apple Mac, Atari ST, Amigas (funny how they all begin with 'A'). By the late 90s there was BeOS too. Windows 9x always felt like the shittiest desktop offering to pretty much anyone who'd used pretty much any other computer that wasn't an IBM-clone.
So yeah, some of us did know better. But that didn't stop the IBM/Microsoft partnership from monopolising the desktop market. :(
Windows 2000 was the first (and, frankly, only) time I ever felt impressed by a Microsoft OS. Then they went and ruining it with all the bling in XP (for those who weren't aware, the first release of XP was basically just a skinned version of Windows 2000 but which required literally twice the system resources to run. It wasn't until somewhere around service pack 2 or 3 before XP became the platform that everyone identifies with these days).
Windows 95 would round-trip some calls through DOS so that it was possible to use DOS device drivers in Windows 95. There were also many 32bit applications for DOS that used DOS extenders (which Windows 95 also was) to manage memory and resources and call back into DOS as necessary. They would also do their own hardware calls, etc. If those are 32bit DOS applications than I would still argue is accurate (but a stretch) to call Windows 95 one as well.
> Not to mention a whole boat load of better home computers than IBM-clones, such as Acorn Archimedes, Apple Mac, Atari ST, Amigas (funny how they all begin with 'A').
In this era, many of these machines didn't even use protected memory. There is no comparison -- these proprietary systems didn't stand a chance.
You have to bare in mind that Windows 95 was the first time Microsoft had asked desktop developers to switch away from DOS and given Windows graphics and sound API calls were still pretty unoptimised and that the platform as a whole was new, it’s understandable that it took some developers a few years to turn their backs on DOS (particularly games developers). But please don’t mistake developer pragmatism for Windows being a DOS shell. Windows 95 was actually a very clever design evolution and an OS in its own right.
And yeah some of the early 90s competitors didn’t have protected memory, but neither did Windows 3.x. Some did have preemptive multitasking back when Windows didn’t (Win 95 introduced that), and other features Windows sorely missed too. I’ll agree with Windows 95 did up the game somewhat but frankly Microsoft needed to.
I loved the ST and Amiga too but in fairness Windows 95 had to be able to run on any random PC whereas the superior systems tightly controlled the hardware. That’s why it needed the DOS underlay, almost like a HAL.