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Comment by prezjordan | Hacker News Reader

Hey HN - author here.

This was my burnout recovery project in April of 2020. Very much a labor of love and a surprising way to realize I still liked programming. I wrote some scattered thoughts here [0]

I also "run" this project quite differently than I usually do - when I receive a pull request instead of merging it I do a quick glance through the user's github to make sure they're not a spammer before giving them _commit access_ and asking them to merge their own PR [1]. It has worked wonders.

[0]: https://notes.jordanscales.com/ffa53b57

[1]: https://twitter.com/jdan/status/1528026508564078593

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This is awesome that it was so therapeutic to you! I have several such personal projects that I occasionally work on for similar reasons, moreover to experience the joy of pure programming as opposed to the daily BS I deal with.

One critique (more of a suggested improvement) - the dropdown boxes don’t look/behave as they did in Win 98. They actually render as native select tags on my browser when focused and it kind of breaks the immersion. I’m pretty sure implementing this to simulate the 98 version would be a bit difficult and would involve some JavaScript (which I know you want to avoid), but it may be a neat challenge to tinker with.

Sounds like you want that commit access.

Can you elaborate, what's it supposed to behave like?

Are you sure you need elaboration? They're rendering natively when opened: https://i.imgur.com/1Q7KjB0.png

Windows 98 dropdowns look like e.g.: https://imgur.com/rVQhAIq

Although I agree that it breaks immersion but using JS would certainly make this too complicated and probably not worth it, considering it will be buggy for sure.

There might be a way: https://web.dev/state-of-css-2022/#customizing-select-elemen...

> This was my burnout recovery project in April of 2020.

OS UI projects are actually good for this. Back in the day, when Classic Mac OS was customizable thanks to its Theme Manager, I went through a few Kaleidoscope schemes for the same reason. Very therapeutical.

Well done!

Strongly agree. Theming in general is a fantastic way to do what you're good at (code and design) but have more agency than "write a test and code that passes it". My goto used to be 3DS home screen themes.

Sounds like the optimistic merging principle of the late Pieter Hintjens: http://hintjens.com/blog:106

I made Obsidian's windows 98 ui theme (now almost defunct with UI overhaul) with help of this.

Seeing the "hello world from VB4" brought back many fond memories. Definitely integrating this into some projects!

very fun stuff...just wanted to share this i found

the win 98 there is using css and js. experiments thats aimed at fun is always welcome

https://twitter.com/PCBANGio/status/1493850712471527426

I don't know what I'm going to do with it, but I'm going to do *something* with it.

Very nice thank you for sharing this.

Were there times you felt like you were wasting your time when doing this project?

No - I tend to not take myself too seriously and was very much optimizing for smiles over "usefulness" or "github stars" so it was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Nice touch with the cowbell slider ;)

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