Broider: Pixel Art CSS Borders | Hacker News Reader

Broider: Pixel Art CSS Borders

maxbittker.github.io

582 pointsthesephist54 comments

Brilliant… and nostalgic. Windows 3’s control panel had a facility to draw tiled pixel patterns which was a simpler version of this. It was called the Pattern: https://swiat-owocow.pl/grafiki/wallpaper-win30.png

wow , I had forgotten all about that -- when I saw the sub window I was hit with some serious nostalgia.

3.x had some interesting priorities with regards to what a user may want to do, you don't realize (remember..) that in some ways the users of the past were more empowered than they are now until something like that is thrown in front of you to remember.

Windows 95-2000 still had the pattern option as well: https://i.imgur.com/WVePNGj.jpg

Fun times were had by my young self, though like you I had forgotten all about it until just now.

---

Edit: Oh wow, it's secretly still an option, even in Windows 11!

Try this:

- Get rid of your wallpaper image, set it to Solid Color instead.

- Open regedit.

- Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Control Panel/Desktop.

- Add a new String Value called Pattern.

- Set the value of Pattern to the data from one of these: https://i.imgur.com/C2KcZFE.jpg

Or presumably a custom one, since the data just seems to be the pixels to colour, but I'm not sure in what format. I just tried it with Tulip though and now I have a desktop tulip pattern!

Thank you for posting this. I spent a long time hating on “M$” back in the day when they were embracing and extending everything, including the web. As the years go by though, I have built only an ever increasing respect for how Windows manages to retain backwards comparability with the Neolithic ages. …and now, this. Incredible.

The numbers themselves look to be eight bytes of eight bits. The 50% gray gives it away:

  >>> 0b01010101
  85
  >>> 0b10101010
  170

What happens if you put more than 8 bytes in there? Or a negative number? What about “ ªU ªU ªU ªU”, the bytes for the grayscale? Give it a poke!

Makes sense; the pattern is 8x8 pixels, each number representing one row.

Aah, the gradient title bar, IIRC that came with Windows 98.

It’s probably a funny artifact of the architecture and the impracticality of image-based background on the hardware of the day that this was made available.

PatBlt() was a fast way to fill a given rectangle with a color (or xor it), but it was also a fast way to blit the pattern brush currently selected to the device context (hdc). No doubt the 2D accelerated hardware capability this was made to work with was tied up in being able to quickly scan out to the clip region while selecting the corresponding byte per line.

Win GDI was a fascinating hardware centric abstraction.

My family had a Macintosh when I was a kid and it had a similar feature in MacPaint called brush mirrors.

The creator has an interesting home page, too: https://maxbittker.com

Oh and he’s behind https://twitter.com/NYT_first_said. Such a fun Twitter account.

Seems like it died the day Elon turned off all API support.

feels like it was influenced by Kid Pix / broderbund

seen

That (the borders, when slide is not entirely to left) makes me think of Qi charging / induction.

Also I love it how you can remove parts you saw or aren't interested in. Fekt like a Google Keep kind of note taking.

just tell him https://maxbittker.com/mailto

That's cool!

It only works with ASCII characters though.

Wow that is super cool! Damn!

Wow

This is delightful fun, but suffers a bit from Mystery Meat Navigation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation#Iconog...)

The pencil and eraser I get, and I thought one of the controls was Undo, but that one seems to be a toggle? And I have no idea what the last one is.

Toggles symmetry. Def not obvious.

I just tried it for the first time on a laptop; there, when squares light up in the symmetric cells as you mouse over a target, it's a bit more intuitive. On mobile, it's a lot harder to figure out.

https://imgur.com/a/fATiS7p

Thank you, you made me smile. :)

This is awesome! One minor gripe: In Firefox, the borders flash every time they repaint

cmd+shift+r

Sea theme: https://i.imgur.com/DZrrXnM.png

Nice, save the pixel state in the URL so they're shareable! ..., Max

What a cool little tool, the simplicity is brilliant. For those on mobile, rotate to landscape to see additional options.

I don’t see any extra options on iOS? I was hoping for a download button.

I'm so sorry...

.broider { border-image: url("data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAFQAAABUCAYAAAAcaxDBAAAAAXNSR0IArs4c6QAAAjRJREFUeF7tnEFyAyEMBPE38v+3+Rv2Obhqx1MaLIw7VySBmpF2IdncBj9RArdoNIINgIZFANDTgd7HeDg5/o29qmw7hQLUkdMbtgB9A5JjcjzQ1Qm68dXmuD3VnV/Flz00PeEMxI0PUEEAoAKQKgkUuvi9cFZodUOq/tWWsl0PrQKp+gN0qiCAhoEA1OzR1ZKsPhTVhm3XQxUwNa4SBqgiOI0D9NdK3hSIbd79HmovWDjIHpqeUPWwasm6/un8ABomCtDTgIbzaQ/XrtB2AuEFABSgYQLhcCgUoGEC4XAoFKBhAuFwtkLVbym7j34un3Q+ABW3Xa5AAApQt6iv7T9e8mpClZ5bMipedXx1PrLkVy+gCsj1X50PQM0dURUH0NVA3ZJQO2aut928mv+LQqsB24kUF1DNH6DTBgC0qMjZvR2oyme3HusCc/Mrl7w7obJfPQ7QMGGAfjtQ1aRVT6z+rVKY30s4d32uvX1SAuj1x7oAFV8zo1DRM1xArr1U6Oqedlp8gIZ3FKAADRMIh0OhAA0TCIdDoQANEwiH206h7m2QOgqHeclwAJWIPAOAerykNUAlIs9AAl3d09zLh+p9rfJX+FTPBqj5NTRAzes8FBr+nyXHAVUJqXFVkj/XQxUwNQ5Q86EA0PBDAaAA/U/g0y/2SoFqnB5KD73WyGqFfL1CVQLV8e6zfHX9s788y6cnVC/WVYW7/un8ABomCtDTgIbzaQ/XrtB2AuEFABSgYQLhcE8DujBkS1iknAAAAABJRU5ErkJggg==") 28 / 28px / 0 round; border-width: 28px; border-style: solid; }

Wow! This reminds me of something similar I did and am proud of. I gave the tools to designers/developers in companies that we were pitching to help them design "smooth rounded corners" in either CSS or Flash during the early 2000s.

I don't remember the years but around 2004-2006, smooth rounded corners were still hard to do if you do not know "feathering" in the graphic software and then using it in CSS or as sprites for Flash.

I have lost the tool and the code but here is the article I wrote after reading happy emails from developers. https://brajeshwar.com/2005/splice9-bitmap-window-resizer-co...

I used this technique for making Super Mario World style borders for HTML elements a couple of years ago. https://ooer.com/blog/2020-09-10-image-border/

Very cool, would be great to have a way to share these or to view ones others have made as presets/templates. Here is a 'double bevelled' border: https://imgur.com/wPxvdCZ

One of the comments points out that the state is saved in the URL.

Really cool! (logged in just to let you know). Put a smile on my face while playing with it.

https://jsfiddle.net/h40bv6sr/

One cant share the creation in the tool.

Just put the data uri behind the page link.

I tried: https://codepen.io/shreydan/pen/ZEjRPwx

Congratulations on building something so amazing and simple

Really cool, love little design tools like this.

This is fantastic. Always a joy to see these small, single purpose CSS tools.

Nice, but how do I save it?

Copy the CSS in the second text box. It's generating a PNG border-image and encoding it as a base64 dat url so that it can be embedded directly in the CSS.

Not visible on mobile, had to toggle desktop view to see it.

Hold landscape.

Pretty cool! Could use a way to clear without needing to manually erase

Nice. A small problem: the color input doesn't work on Safari.

This is wonderful!

This is not how a 9patch works…. It’s currently a 2 patch boring auto rotating and flipping border

You can have a real 9 patch if you disable symmetry. It's not obvious, but it's the lower-left icon.

Yass, it's mulzitouch

This is great. Well done.

Absolutely brilliant!

Neat

this is SO cool

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