It's hard to justify snowflake animations on your website...
Thank goodness for Firefox reader mode. That animation is so incredibly distracting.
I can't stand animations while I'm trying to read something, and this one is particularly egregious.
(TBF, it slowly fades the animation out, probably for aesthetic reasons, to avoid a jarring sudden stop. I do agree, though, that a sudden stop would probably be more appropriate in this context)
Let me introduce you to "neko"...
There's also JS to add a neko to a webpage.
Cute, but also not good when trying to focus on reading.
I’m trying to read but my eyes keep jumping to the movement and I lose my place.
I understand people think it’s “fun” but I think it’s just so disrespectful to the reader.
Yes, it is a bit hypocritical, but you can look at the content of the message and judge it without judging the presentation of the message, even if it talks about usability of interfaces in computer software.
As the worst UX expert in the world, you can obviously feel free to criticize others, but you're probably going to lose a lot of people after the first sentence if you're using 2003 MySpace-style blinking text and animated GIFs to make your point.
But, if a 4-year old boy finds "there's more of them with bigger guns", and a general has a personal interest in hurting someone without you knowing that, you'd be unwise to not consider the words of the boy as you prep your military strategy.
Note that you were careful to establish hard-to-prove circumstances ("served in similar circumstances"), which seems to say that you don't want to discount what the non-expert is saying too easily either.
Whether or not the author cares will certainly be influenced by the fact it’s just a personal blog. I wouldn’t expect them to change anything for that reason alone, but the criticism stands nonetheless.
it absolutely would not, it would be more akin to someone wearing a fat-suite for a joke and criticizing someone for running with bad form
but you are taking this so seriously I can't quite tell if you're joking anyway
They already did, as the grandparent comment already explained:
>> TBF, you can turn it off by clicking on the snowflake icon in the top right corner.
TBF, I felt so perfectly trolled with this one I couldn't help but chuckle... :)
Also do check his privacy policy https://tonsky.me/personal-information/
<blink>
And it got noticeably warm.
That explains my other comment, which speculated the snow as the cause for my iPhone instantly overheating, followed by screen-dimming throttling.
Also: this is not a plea to stop putting snow/etc on pages. I miss the days of such things in earlier internet. I'd trade back janky plugins and Flash player crashes for the humanizing & personalized touch many sites had back then.
That snowflakes were the author’s preference? That’s too much madness for one day.
Funny, i disliked this exact detail. I thought turning it off hadn't worked for a few seconds and i retoggled it on and off a bunch of times before i got it
And yes, I did think "this is terrible, there must be a way to change it", clicking the snowflake icon. The colour changed to a new colour but otherwise it didn't seem to change, so I just clicked back.
Because, as you noted, the snowflakes slowly end, which I didn't realize until seeing your comment.
It's fun. Looks neat. It's an extremely poor idea for a site trying to convey textual information.
Edit: I'm not implying it's a good thing.
It's a joke that did not drop. Given the audience is trying to read text. And he's making it annoying to read text.
It's like a stand-up comedian telling a joke, in a wild accent; where the audience cannot discern what he's saying.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20251207071946/https://tonsky.me...
I'd imagine he thought the blog was mostly going to be about UI. "Haha, a blog talking about UI, with bad UI. Isn't that funny!"
Like there's no way the flashlight UI was done for usability purposes. It has to be a joke.
The article is good but the choice of distracting snowflakes or radioactive piss burning your retina is not a welcome one.
1. I scrolled through the article getting more and more frustrated with the snow
2. I scrolled all the way back to the top and saw the snowflake icon
3. I clicked the snowflake, saw the hideous yellow, said WTF and clicked again to go back to blue
4. **I never noticed** that the snowflake *does* stop the snow, but *only* stops *new* snow, so the existing snow continues to fall across the screen
5. I clicked several other things, then came here to complain and saw this thread > although then you get a yellow background
I ended up using reader mode to read the page. The whole site design undermined the point being made. One of the first things mentioned is not to be distracting. Yet they went out of their way to make their own site distracting. "Do as I say, not as I do."
This is such a common failure mode with coders who do their own design. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.
Do you not realize that the stakes are different between that and a whole OS?