[HN Gopher] Retro nostalgia and why my new website looks like Wi...
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Retro nostalgia and why my new website looks like Window 9x (2019)
Author : cardamomo
Score : 161 points
Date : 2021-04-17 15:38 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ash.ms)
(TXT) w3m dump (ash.ms)
| Lammy wrote:
| The author also released a lot of these UI components as an ISC-
| licensed Preact library: https://github.com/AshKyd/ui95
| sdwvit wrote:
| This blog is fun to poke around. There is a bug with time tho, it
| says 0:25 pm for me instead of 12:25pm
| [deleted]
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Props to this dude for actually getting most of the details
| right. Though I don't think the font is correct.
|
| A lot of folks try to do 'retro' but they screw it up by getting
| key details wrong... maybe the simple bezels have the wrong light
| angle, maybe the colors are too high a bit depth, and so on. A
| lot of games mix pixel sizes or use free rotation without
| quantizing it to the pixel grid (especially annoying!)
|
| If you're going to take the retro route, don't cheap out on the
| details. Do it all the way or don't bother.
|
| Bravo
| jolmg wrote:
| > If you're going to take the retro route, don't cheap out on
| the details. Do it all the way or don't bother.
|
| That's quite passionate of you. I like how the OP added their
| own things. It's quite creative. For example, Paint has
| multiple themes, rendering of the undo history as a GIF, and
| multi-language support. I don't remember Windows 98's Paint
| having any of that, and it's all awesome.
| KMnO4 wrote:
| I don't think he made paint. It's from https://jspaint.app/
| tomc1985 wrote:
| That's cool. I did a bit more poking around and found a few
| more inaccuracies, but they are not really visible from the
| surface so it's cool. (Namely... there's an Access Denied
| dialog box that uses forward slashes when it should be using
| backslashes for a path)
| majkinetor wrote:
| Yeah, great work indeed, and very fast too... Some good skills
| in there.
|
| Not suitable for blog though, IMO, but I guess better for PR.
| Macuyiko wrote:
| > A lot of games mix pixel sizes or use free rotation without
| quantizing it to the pixel grid
|
| So happy I am not the only one with this pet peeve. Never
| understood why so called retro games simply not render at a
| higher resolution backbuffer and then scale it down to a low-
| res one.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| I have never understood this either! It is trivial to set up
| buffer upscaling and simply render to that, but people don't.
| Lammy wrote:
| > Though I don't think the font is correct.
|
| As much as I love the authenticity the site would probably be a
| lot less readable/usable if it exactly simulated the rendering
| of the original bitmap MS Sans Serif. Old bitmap font glyphs
| were manually drawn per-size and were generally expected to be
| viewed on a CRT where the inherent characteristics of the
| display gave a kind of ClearType-esque blurring that would be
| expected by font designers.
|
| MS Sans Serif was replaced with an OpenType version of itself
| (now known as "Microsoft Sans Serif") in Win2k but then you
| have the copyright issue of redistributing it:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Sans_Serif
| Rendello wrote:
| For what it's worth it does match the original bitmap exactly
| if anti-aliasing is off and the font size is 11px. I found
| this out just a week or so back; I just did a similar project
| emulating Windows 9x.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Win2000 used Tahoma everywhere didn't it? It woudn't quite be
| Windows 98 but I feel like this site is a mishmash of Win9x
| anyway
| cblconfederate wrote:
| I recently removed all animations from my android and the zero
| latency blows me away, it's like it got instantly way faster.
| Wish i could do that for the web
|
| Most of the sins of the modern web can be easily undone
| jsmith99 wrote:
| For the web, if you have the right accessibility settings in
| your operating system or browser, then the prefers-reduced-
| motion media query should tell sites not to show you
| animations.
|
| Not many developers explicitly add support for this, but it's
| included in eg bootstrap.
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pref...
| unicornporn wrote:
| Just disabled, how lovely!
| deergomoo wrote:
| > Wish i could do that for the web
|
| I would imagine something like `* { transition: none
| !important; animation: none !important; }` would get you pretty
| far right?
| userbinator wrote:
| ...in a browser that supports user stylesheets, which
| unfortunately means only Firefox and IE, by default. It's
| possible to work around that with extensions, however.
| Keyframe wrote:
| Thanks for the tip. Night and day difference!
| FiddlerClamp wrote:
| Careful, some apps seem to rely on those animations. Uber, I've
| found, has issues displaying the location of the vehicle if I
| set them all to 0.0. No problem if I set them to 0.5.
| 88840-8855 wrote:
| that sounds like a terrible design decision of the app.
| m463 wrote:
| maybe it prevents the driver from breaking the speed limit
| :)
| satysin wrote:
| Oh how I wish I could do this on macOS. Yes there is a "reduce
| motion" setting but there is no _remove_ motion setting and a
| whole bunch of animations remain most notably minimize
| /maximize of windows (I can at least change from the default
| Genie effect to Scale which is faster), opening an application
| it still "zooms" into the screen, etc.
|
| I would happily pay for a third party app to nuke every single
| damn animation if I could but Apple make it impossible (or at
| least that is what is claimed).
|
| And of course this doesn't even touch on how laggy resizing
| many applications on macOS is (yes even on the shiny new M1
| models). The Microsoft Office suite, Chrome and a whole bunch
| of other applications are _horrible_ when resizing. It isn 't
| often an issue with Apple's applications for what that's worth.
| anthk wrote:
| Open a Terminal. Then, copy and paste these contents:
|
| https://gist.githubusercontent.com/lexrus/081fa687d8b2475d33.
| ..
|
| Also, Tinker Tool in OSX did that, IDK it it's still working.
|
| https://www.bresink.com/osx/0TinkerTool/details.html
| satysin wrote:
| Oh I know every single tweak out there, sadly many no
| longer work in Big Sur. But even before that you have not
| been able to fully disable every animation in macOS for as
| long as I can remember.
| njharman wrote:
| Wasn't slow enough and didn't crash / not feeling the nostalgia.
| rodolphoarruda wrote:
| LOL. You know, I was just expecting that to happen. But then,
| everything was running so smoothly with zero load times. I
| clicked the media player and it popped-up already loaded with a
| dozen videos on it. This alone, back in the day, would be
| something like: click-and-go-fix-your-lunch kind of experience.
| imperialdrive wrote:
| This site loads and looks wonderfully on my mobile device. Kinda
| incredible how natural the interface feels.
| ponytech wrote:
| Anyone knows the framework used to build such a website?
|
| I had been looking for this and the closest I could found is
| https://www.os-js.org
| ponytech wrote:
| After looking at the source, I found the answer:
| https://github.com/AshKyd/ui95
| aftabh wrote:
| For some reason, I had to close the website quickly after
| browsing for a little while. For a moment it felt like I'm
| looking and going through someone personal desktop (which has
| been left unlocked) without their consent while at the same time
| I was really well-aware that it's just a personal website for
| public. Weird feeling :)
|
| Edit: On second thought, it looks like it did one thing really
| well is refreshing my own personal memory of Windows 9x
| (personally, I've good memory of Windows 98, before I switched to
| Linux based desktop -- Ubuntu specifically).
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| This is relevant to my interests...
| yoz-y wrote:
| While an interesting experiment. It does break a lot of web
| stuff.
|
| E.g.:
|
| - Middle clicking on a "blog post" text file opens new tab, but
| without the post opened.
|
| - Middle clicking on the date of a blog posts, opens a literal
| html transcription of the page (wrong mime?)
|
| - In general, I don't need another window manager, the system and
| the browser handle that fine.
| jancsika wrote:
| Is there an HTML5 "make my cursor be good" library?
|
| Because when I do stuff like this, it looks so appealing to just
| declare a cursor in a CSS rule. Then HTML5 is all like:
|
| * ha ha. There's a default set _somewhere else_ in the DOM that
| 's overriding your cursor (as in the author's website where the
| titlebar triggers the text edition cursor).
|
| * ha ha. I'll show your desired cursor for the DOM element, but
| when you drag the element with the mouse I'm going to _flicker_
| every time the mouse beats Javascript to a location that lies
| _outside_ that element 's bbox.
|
| Especially when making a UI to drag SVG rects, this gets
| annoying. I doubt there's a pseudo class for "this thing I am
| dragging right now using a mousemove event listener," but maybe
| I'm wrong.
| jaflo wrote:
| The approach I have seen is to apply the cursor you want to the
| entire body using JS so even if your cursor momentarily escapes
| the element the wanted cursor is shown. You just need to make
| sure to revert back to the default cursor when the users stops
| dragging or the window loses focus.
| vmception wrote:
| I've run into _a lot_ of people that mistake retro nostalgia for
| out of touch and out of date design.
|
| I've heard half a dozen people say curve.fi has a problem for
| them because of the geocities-like site design
|
| curve.fi one of the most respected and used application in its
| sector
|
| It is confusing to use because of the interface, but its design
| is very intentional and is obviously retro nostalgia
|
| but as far as dropping funds into it or not, the site design is
| completely benign in that decision making
|
| just something to be aware of that there are a lot of older
| people who don't know stuff they are familiar with is retro
| enough to be nostalgic now
| mgraczyk wrote:
| Really love the look and responsive feel. Also pretty easy to
| find content (blogs on desktop, games in start menu, etc).
|
| One odd thing I noticed, when I navigate "back" to your site
| after clicking a link, sometimes the page renders HTML as text.
| For example. I somehow ended up on this page which just shows the
| page's HTML for me
|
| https://ash.ms/html5-canvas
|
| The content-type in the response is text/plain
| dehrmann wrote:
| Reminds me a little of when Meebo came out and people were blown
| away seeing a windowed UI in a browser.
| alamortsubite wrote:
| And Desktop.com, about five years before that.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Heh. "Windows _Me_. " Punny.
| scyclow wrote:
| I'm not sure I agree, but a lot of people classify my work under
| the retro nostalgia umbrella. Personally, I'd prefer to classify
| it as neo-retro nostalgia.
|
| http://fastcashmoneyplus.biz https://ronamerch.co
| lecarore wrote:
| I was following along on fast cash money plus, at which point
| do you tell users to stop and that it is a scam ? I mean, it's
| kinda clear, but do you let them go all the way ?
| hirundo wrote:
| Is there a kind of nostalgia that isn't retro?
| TedShiller wrote:
| Yes, there are imagined visions of the future, which are also a
| kind of style that people can long for.
| [deleted]
| neom wrote:
| Nostalgia is a feeling and in this context, retro is a style.
| In the sense that they both refer to the past, maybe. Here to
| be nostalgic is to opine in the present about the retro style.
| However generally speaking, one could have a feeling of
| nostalgia towards a smell, feeling, colour, moment etc,
| nostalgia does not have to be retro(style), unless retro is
| specifically retroactive, and that isn't the case here.
| coldtea wrote:
| A few pine for lost futures.
| hirundo wrote:
| Those are retro futures.
| coldtea wrote:
| Yeah, like the "60s version of the future", but not always.
|
| You can feel nostalgia for novel, just invented, futures
| too (in the sense of feeling a loss for not being able to
| go there).
| rbanffy wrote:
| We were promised vacations on the Moon, space stations,
| and rocket belts. All that while keeping the simple life
| of the period.
|
| What we got is a dystopian nightmare that could have been
| written by Charlie Stross (I know you lurk here) or
| William Gibson, except that the dialogues and plot are
| destitute of any interesting feature.
| reggegg wrote:
| Cool, have you looked into getting the original Windows fonts in
| there as well (title bar, start menu etc)? Helvetica I think?
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| Windows used Tahoma as the system font from 95 to XP. Vista-
| onwards used Segoe UI.
| rbanffy wrote:
| We do anti-aliasing much better now.
| Keyframe wrote:
| Even though we're eons ahead in tech, especially mobile, 90's
| seem to have peaked a lot of ideas which we slowly iterated upon
| ever since. Not as many leaps since, or any, outside of mobile.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| I think "being ahead in tech" can mean two things: we've
| refined and improved iteratively in things like reliability,
| distributed computing and processor tech but, I don't think
| we've really had a real novelty since the rise of the iPhone.
| Keyframe wrote:
| That's what I meant. Seems like, well the feeling is that,
| there was this cambrian explosion of ideas that were just
| then possible to be materialized due to tech finally being
| able to, well materialize them into that cambrian explosion.
| Right now I cannot think of much / any tech outside of real
| of possibility with tech we have. Take VR as an example,
| which is still not there, it was there in the 90's. Crude and
| various approaches, but there.
|
| Since, we had iPhone/mobile and ML recently. I cannot think
| of other seemingly leaps. I might be wrong, of course, since
| it's all based on a feeling.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| I agree, although I don't know that ML is actually a
| "leap": my general impression is that a certain subset of
| "AI" techniques became practical because of GPU advances,
| which lead to an explosion of practical applications: the
| technique itself isn't particularly new, afaict.
| GartzenDeHaes wrote:
| Check out the 1970's https://youtu.be/uknEhXyZgsg?t=1166
| Keyframe wrote:
| Definitely. Lots of ideas from decades before, but started
| culminating in-front of our eyes during 90s in-front of
| general audience.
| treeman79 wrote:
| Blinking text, marquee, endless browsers pop ups that could not
| be stopped. Unable to quit a browser. Active X/Java.
|
| It was an awesome and horrible time.
| Keyframe wrote:
| True, but interpretation/emohasis is wrong. Start with
| browser and web and then iterations on it. That's only part
| of everything.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I miss the persistence of the phosphor and the simple elegance of
| the pre-PC fonts. I miss the cadenced hum of the teletypes, that
| 10 Hz suspense between silence and the racket of the type element
| hitting paper.
|
| When using Windows 95, I realized I was living inside what would
| have been science fiction for most of my life.
|
| This is really solid work (kudos, Ash), but I'm an older audience
| who pines for a different past.
| hyakosm wrote:
| With a RaspberryPi, a serial interface and a real VT terminal
| you can still do a lot of things!
| anthk wrote:
| Install unifont, set it up to 32px.
|
| As for the terminal, use anything.
| xuhu wrote:
| I wonder why icons and GUI elements look weird when scaled (I
| have 125% scaling enabled in Windows 10) whereas Windows 95
| screenshot images look perfect in the same browser (Chrome). The
| website seems to use images for Close, Minimize, Maximize icons
| so it's probably not a scaling issue.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| It is a scaling issue. image-rendering: crisp-
| edges;
| fortran77 wrote:
| windows 95 was not "built on top of MS-DOS". I don't know where
| this lie started. It was built from the ground up as a 32-bit
| native operating system.
| userbinator wrote:
| Your second sentence is the lie. It's actually a hypervisor
| that runs MS-DOS VMs, and thus quite close to Win3.x in
| enhanced mode, but the "system VM" is mostly still 16-bit code.
|
| See the series of books by Andrew Schulman for details.
| [deleted]
| layer8 wrote:
| The referenced Progressbar95 game is hilarious (and deeply
| nostalgic): https://youtu.be/aTM8wxMIIx8
| f430 wrote:
| https://soundcloud.com/montaime/mtss-204
|
| i love this song that started playing
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Good song. But it reminds me of the 80s rather than the 90s.
| f430 wrote:
| yeah has that sweet melodramatic progression.
|
| wonder what kind of genre or sound this is called
|
| saounds a bit like los amigos invisibles
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