SQLook – A free online SQLite database manager with a Windows 2000 interface | Hacker News Reader

SQLook – A free online SQLite database manager with a Windows 2000 interface

sqlook.com

178 pointsgringow72 comments

The user experience is so (paradoxically) refreshing. Back then you could fit so much useful information and controls into a single screenful; interfaces responded instantly; it was easy to figure where things are and what I'm looking at. With "modern" UIs, you can't get a big picture of what you're working on because there is so much white space and scrolling; the application is slower than your fingers; with each application, you have to learn the designer's "vision" in order to figure out where things are and what you're looking at.

Very well said, sometimes I feel the modern stack could re-learn and improve.

> interfaces responded instantly

I wish this nostalgic myth would die. Back in the Win 9x days we all had laughably slow spinning disks and hardly any RAM. Interfaces for simple programs like Minesweeper and Notepad were instant, sure. But anything heavy like Word, IE, Encarta, Visual Studio, etc. were definitely not.

Most of those kinds of apps are way faster now than they were in the 90s, mostly thanks to SSDs. (Visual Studio is a notable exception - they really screwed it up after 6.0.)

> Most of those kinds of apps are way faster now than they were in the 90s

I strongly disagree.

when you click save or when memory has to be paged/loaded, etc, yes.

when it comes to responding to user input - while memory is being swapped, yes.

in contrast, even when the computer wasn't responding, it never lost keystrokes. I'd type ahead and then the characters would appear when it was ready.

now, the windows computer just randomly loses characters and loses focus for no reason. if it's not paying attention when you're typing or clicking, it just won't respond.

Windows doesn't randomly lose characters or focus for me.

Re: losing focus: Maybe this a problem with tap to click on a touchpad? This happens to me and drives me crazy and it's invariably me inadvertently clicking with my palms. Disabling tap to click helps a lot.

I use an external keyboard, but I'm referring to the cases where popups and various things taking their time and showing up and disappearing. e.g. if I open teams and switch to something else, when teams finishes loading it comes to the front of the screen instead of staying in its lane. so it steals focus from say a text editor. it's like the user is supposed to be really dumb and slow, so you're meant to click on teams and wait a few minutes for it to load properly and then start interacting with the computer again.

My problem with Windows today is it taking so long waiting for it to switch focus sometimes. If I don't artificially wait, a few keystrokes go to the previous target or off into the aether.

that's one of my issues with it, but forgot to specify - I really really hate clicking or typing and having to do it again.

It's a biased viewpoint, but it's not nostalgia. The following all happened to me:

- 486 Packard Bell that I upgraded ram from 4MB -> 12MB as a kid? Win 3.1 went from being slow period to Windows 95 being fast any time I didn't touch disk or CD-ROM.

- ZSNES on Pentium MMX? Zero lag gameplay with time-travel debugging and full memory view.

- DOS running on a Pentium 4 to support legacy software? Nearly instant everything, especially power on -> usable machine.

You'll notice a common thread. It was possible to outrun the demons of sluggishness back then.

It is no myth. Go try a Windows 2000 system and compare it to today. Windows 2000 will respond a lot faster (often instant), even on complex applications.

I ran this test myself when another obsolete bit of Y2K kit recently fell into my hands: even with a 256Gb spinning-rust drive and 1Gb of RAM, just using Windows Explorer to copy, move, and delete files took a fraction of the time my main rig did.

And my main rig is a Dell T7920 running Win11 Pro for Workstations 24h2, with a Gen4 TLC NVMe directly attached to the Gen3 PCIe bus (at 7,000/6,900Mbps it can totally saturate its channel), 256Gb of 3200Mhz DDR4 LRDIMMs (4×32Gb), and dual 8C/16T Intel Silver 4110 CPUs.

By any measure, my current rig should have blown the Win2k machine out of the water. The Win2k machine did the file operations in HALF THE F**KING TIME

Disable Windows Defender on your main rig and try again?

But anything heavy like Word, IE, Encarta, Visual Studio, etc. were definitely not.

At any given point, old applications are faster and current applications are slow, slowness being unevenly distributed: if you can pay extra for bigger memory and CPU, you get to use the fast lane.

Also consider that companies balance a number of factors: costs for themselves, time to market, features, what the competition offers. New, more powerful hardware is an opportunity for them to make sloppy software cheaper and first to launch.

>"Most of those kinds of apps are way faster now"

Some calculation intensive parts sure are thanks to modern CPU with plenty of cache and RAM and multiple cores.

GUI on the other hand are often atrocious

It's worth remembering you had far fewer pixels to play with; I remember 800x600 and 1024x768 being the standard monitor resolutions of the day.

I think that's a poor excuse. Screen resolutions are higher now but our machines are also orders of magnitude more powerful.

A lot of modern websites even add an intentional delay for buttons to respond or even load because it "looks nice."

Unsure what exactly counts as "looks nice" but I'll often add an intentional delay to buttons whose actions are near instantaneous but not great to do multiple times so that you don't accidentally click it twice.

I'm thinking something way less necessary. One example off the top of my head is https://www.apple.com/iphone/ with all the text appearing slowly as you scroll down. It's kinda understandable cause it's just the marketing page. But some websites have these slow animations everywhere, both for elements appearing and for button clicks.

This is an old practice suggested by HCI research going back decades

I think it's pretty cool that the source code is all in a single file called app.js, and it's just doing simple DOM manipulations, no React, no minification, no libraries. I like to think it's just written like that too, a gigantic file that the author just iterates on.

It's incredibly refreshing to see that you can still build decently complex web apps without a huge swath of JS build tools

And that's the "magic" that makes it so snappy and fast to load. I built a web-based game just like that and I am confident that my choice not to use any of the "modern web dev stack" is the reason I managed to hit my 60 FPS performance target on an iPhone 6s in 2024.

Show HN!

I'd have loved to, but because of its nature as a live game show with cash prizes, it required that the user signs up with their phone number, as a way to make botting and multi-account a bit harder. I know that wouldn't go over well with the audience here.

The game is no more, but maybe I could put together a little post talking about the more interesting problems I had to tackle, and showing the animations I am the most proud of. Maybe some day!

Thanks, and yes thats exactly how it happened. I just made it originally for myself and i like my own stuff to be fast. And then over the weekend i thought it could be nice to just publish it (with some win2000 theme over it)

Strange how people are always so negative. Always with the nitpicking. Functionally of course 90s style UX and desktop productivity has always been far higher. Palantir's blueprint UI doesn't even specifically target mobile.

Yeah, seems many people can just moan online. At least I hope they aren't like this in daily life... It is pretty annoying how, while the HN audience grew steadily, from the 'wow great how you made this' went to 'this is crap and a joke' basically. Or maybe it's my memory and it was always quite bad, but then I don't really want to know; I find shooting down projects, unless they actually are super low effort (while asking money) or claiming blatant untruths (FOSS while it's not), is some kind of insecurity thing broken people do.

Of course reporting bugs is a good thing, but that's not just burning down someone's efforts willy nilly.

fun fact: sqlite is only about 5.5 months younger than windows 2000...

That is not an accurate reproduction of the classic Windows UI. The 3D bevels on buttons and other beveled elements are wrong and make it look more like Motif if anything.

They should have used 98.css, but with font-face: Tahoma.

https://jdan.github.io/98.css/

Wow, I initially thought that the first dialog box was a screencap of a "real" one...

Impressive!

Pixel-aligned non-antialiased interfaces make it so much easier to reproduce. Good luck emulating current-gen desktop OS rendering on a different software and hardware stack...

Easy to criticize, hard to actually build something.

Thank you :) A real labor of love [0] for me.

[0]: https://notes.jordanscales.com/98-css-reflections

Was the font really the only difference between 98 and 2k?

I think the colors and icons were slightly different, but 98 + Tahoma gets you most of the way there.

The greys were slightly brighter and warmer in 2K.

This reminds me a lot of Datasette.io. See example power plant data: https://global-power-plants.datasettes.com/global-power-plan...

I'd be nervous about giving access to any nonpublic data to a closed-source app that only works while online.

I enabled "Offline mode", and it worked. But yes.

I like it, and I laughed out loud when Clippy popped up. That bastard came out when my college ran everything from slow network drives. He'd bring the system to a grinding halt, unless you were on one of the few workstations with a local hard drive.

Hi all, i noticed the spike in internet traffic and saw its coming from here. Thanks for the compliments. As someone mentioned the visualiser was a bit buggy so i tried to fix it today. I also added a 'drag and drop' query builder.

I am sorry if there is some mistakes here and there about the whole win2000 theme. It was just a weekend project and i always feel those database stuff should be as dusty as old windows..

The visualiser tool seems a little broken

(nodes laid out in a long diagonal line, foreign key reference arrows floating around and not "attached")

Is is still very far from a Windows 2000 interface. But it's still better than most of the websites.

That UI is... something else. Reminds me of some old database tools I used at Scout Forge, we even wrote some blog posts about similar ones. Think it's actually usable for anything beyond a quick peek?

Wow what a work, this is truly joy to go back in years. Great job.

I love it. It looks so clean and functional.

Looks like it is enterprise ready interface.

Haha, true

Finally, an interface that matches our enterprise COBOL codebase, perfect for Y2K-compliant enterprises of 1999 :-)

Oh man. Twinkle in the eyes.

where did it go

lol that's pretty cool!

I thought Windows 2000 was a typo.

What could it possibly be a typo of?

Something relatively modern. Wasn't Win2k a failed product?

Windows Me?

I think so, Me was a failure. 2000 not so much.

My point is, I don't know of anything modern that is spelled sufficiently similar to "Windows 2000" for the latter to be a plausible typo of it.

Windows 2000 was quite successful, and was the most reliable Windows version so far.

You might have a point there. But honestly, it's so ancient that I had to do a double-take when I saw a UI inspired by Windows 2000.

Clippy is an office thing, not win2k.

If I remember right, win2k had the dog. It would appear during Explorer search.

The Clippy resurrection seemed gratuitous.

Just out of curiosity, does any one find these sorts of retro gui appealing in saas-y type software?

I personally am turned off by it.

Unless of course I’m missing the point and it’s supposed to be ironic.

Love the retro look and feel for native apps but yea, it doesn't feel right for a SaaS app.

I think it’s a sign the developer is trying too hard to be cool…

God forbid someone has fun with the design of their own project.

Good UI design is appealing in any type of software.

Some benefits I appreciate:

  * All the text is at a readable size, and had sufficient contrast with the background.
  * The clickable and interactive elements are easy to identify.
  * Text is selectable and can be copied.
  * There are no useless animations(there only to give a dynamic feel without having any function).

Functional but looks nothing like Windows 2000 beyond the titlebar gradient. His name was also Clippit, never Clippy in any Office product (MS started calling him that after he was removed, since everyone else was getting it wrong)

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