Hacker News Reader

Comment by mekwall | Hacker News Reader

Not related to the article. Seems Bret doesn't care much about us Windows users. It's more or less impossible to scroll with your scroll-wheel with that custom scroller. Personally I think he's trying too hard with worrydream.com. I feel it's hard to navigate, with bad responsiveness and clunky, even on Chrome. I believe the bad UX comes from the skeuomorphic design. I've never seen such design work good for a software UI.

That aside, Bret Victor is a genius and I love most of is work. He's a great inspiration to me, and should be to anyone involved in any form of software development.

View on HN

This is more of a show of expression that creating a usable site.

Again this reminds me of the Flash days, where people were doing things because they could rather than because they should. CSS text rotation is a great example of this.

Still I think sites like this are a great playground, and show what can be done.

More so, in stark contrast to Flash, his site is accessible to screen readers, search engines and older browsers.

Not accessible enough: I see only the black screen on my Opera Mini.

Back in the days , making a flash site meant making an accessible fallback as well, and i always designed a pure html fallback for each full flash website i made ,Heavy javascript sites are not accessible by magic.

The irony is this site would have been smoother using flash. On my mack , this webiste is pretty slow and hard to use.

As others have said most flash sites of this kind did the exact same hack and provided an HTML fallback that used JS to replace the fallback div with the correct Object/embed for the browser.

I'm not sure if you're having the same experience, then. Scrolling is almost impossible for me. The only way is if I manually drag the indicator bar, and even then it's clunky.

I'm just going to assume he designed it for a different system that doesn't have these problems. On my end (Opera/Win7), it really does not show "what can be done" :)

What I mean is there's a difference between coding a site that has so much eyecandy the designer wrecks usability (which happened in the old Flash days) and coding a showcase site that looks fine (but flashy and perhaps not entirely intuitive) on some systems, but it a real pain on others. The latter didn't happen nearly as much for Flash because the plugin's the same everywhere, but I think it's more excusable than the former for a showcase website like this (even though it's too bad I can't enjoy the demo--at all).

I guess one advantage he gets is that is works on iOS devices tapping into the hardware acceleration thanks to CSS3 animations.

I fear disable JS will be the new flash blocker :/

I'm on Ubuntu and scrolling with the mousewheel feels like I'm scrolling through tar. A lot of these sites with fancy scrolling hooks seem to do the same, really annoying.

Same on Windows + Chrome, scrolling is pain.

I think you should never hijack the default scrollbars of a browser... But a lot of Google products are doing it also so I guess it's a trend now...

I think it's fine to hijack the default scrollbars so long as all you change is their appearance. If you can't do it without changing the way scrolling via the wheel feels in any way, you need to trash it and use the default scroll bars.

Maybe it's designed for people with touchscreens? On Windows, in Chrome, the scrollwheel sucks, but if you click the page and move the mouse up or down to scroll (dragging), it's much more responsive.

> I believe the bad UX comes from the skeuomorphic design

I can't see a single thing that has its function derived from a real-life object. Maybe I didn't dig deep enough this time, but why not just call it bloat? (Which I think it is - even though it's really butter smooth on Safari)

I think he was referring to Scroll combined with blurred preview of item your hovering over. I could be wrong but it was designed to give a feel of driving in your car through a street full of houses or something.

I thought the point was to use very low-res JPEG files and load the full versions later. The motion blur is still visible when the screenshots are not moving too.

How about... The diapositives, motion blur, scratched wooden surface background and shadowed borders (simulated lighting)? Those are the main design elements of the site, and are all skeuomorphic.

Nothing of this has or had anything to do with functionality on either side of the screen. The motion blur is not even tied to motion on the site (which may or may not be a good thing).

Most "3D hacker interfaces" in Hollywood movies aren't skeuomorphic, yet they blink and rotate and blur and zoom all the time. Same for many Asian TV channels. In what way is worrydream.com bad that doesn't apply to these elements, and why is it caused by textures from real life? Aren't they just all confusing because they are doing too much at once?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com