[HN Gopher] 90s Cursor Effects
___________________________________________________________________
90s Cursor Effects
Author : lysergia
Score : 306 points
Date : 2022-08-29 17:12 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tholman.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (tholman.com)
| dexwiz wrote:
| The trailing and ghost were effects I commonly saw but never
| selected. Just open four programs at once and try to load a
| webpage, viola!
| ge96 wrote:
| That clock one is crazy, to implement it hmm
| slobiwan wrote:
| The clock one is really cool, and I don't recall ever seeing it
| implemented on a website. Who used this?
| tsm wrote:
| My fan site for the TI-86 graphing calculator (first draft done
| as part of 5th grade Computer Class, revised to get extra
| credit in my algebra class a few years later) used it! I had no
| idea what Javascript even was, but I knew how to view source
| and knew that if I pasted in all the magic between <script>
| tags from my computer teacher's website I'd get the cursor
| effect. He (or the original dev...) had very well-annotated
| code that included a bunch of variables you could customize.
| yogenpro wrote:
| I remember this from the era when building websites with
| FrontPage and DreamWeaver was still a thing. There were sites
| with catalogs of those "apply cool effects to your website by
| copy-paste this snippet to your HTML source file", and a clock
| following the mouse cursor is definitely one of them! Fun
| times.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| I had a GeoCities page and really wanted to try the cursor
| effects/followers, but they never seemed to work. I kept
| trying to add them and never saw anything... until I looked
| at the site on a friend's computer in IE and the screen just
| exploded with cursor followers. I was primarily a
| Netscape/Firefox user and didn't consider that my browser
| might not support the effects!
| elwell wrote:
| I remember having a MIDI file of Dido's "Thank You" play in
| the background of my Neopets shop.
| nluken wrote:
| Fashion trends are currently rebelling against the understated
| 2010s by bringing the late 90s/early 2000s aesthetic back in the
| form of wider fits and louder colors. Makes me wonder if/when we
| might see a similar change in web design, or even furniture. I
| might be biased as a younger person without many memories from
| that era, but I'm all for some change (barring impacts to
| accessibility) if it breaks up the monotony of the corporate-lite
| graphic design trends of the mid 2010s.
| TakeBlaster16 wrote:
| I'm just holding out for buttons that look like you can click
| them. Bring back Windows 95
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| I've been building a virtual replica of my 1996 gateway 2000
| in an 86Box VM. I am amazed at how good the Windows 95 UI
| feels. I also want to get screensavers and system sounds
| going on my Linux workstation.
| cronix wrote:
| And the opposite; NOT making things look like buttons that
| aren't actually clickable.
| bovermyer wrote:
| Skeuomorphism is awesome, and I'm absolutely making chunky,
| clickable buttons in a site design I'm working on.
| [deleted]
| jedberg wrote:
| > by bringing the late 90s/early 2000s aesthetic back in the
| form of wider fits and louder colors.
|
| I'm just glad my college clothes will be back in style again,
| right as my daughter gets old enough to care what her dad is
| wearing.
| hackernewds wrote:
| So trade functionality for fashion? Hard pass.
| hashishen wrote:
| found the microsoft guy
| kradeelav wrote:
| re: 90's / 200's design style in websites ... check out
| neocities. there's a recent surge in people creating personal
| sites with exactly that aesthetic / nostalgia in mind.
| ModernMech wrote:
| First one I clicked on had auto-play music. No thank you, I'm
| glad that trend died and it's a shame if it's coming back.
| shmerl wrote:
| Very cool, but snowflakes don't work for some reason.
| toastal wrote:
| I appreciate that the Hacker News title is "90s" correcting the
| author's typo of "90's" (though more pedantically I suppose
| "'90s" could be preferred)
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| From a certain perspective you could say they these effects
| belong to the 90s so they could have used 90s'... or even '90s'
| elwell wrote:
| I'm embarrassed to have only realized the correct form very
| recently (after some resistance in a code review). More
| specifically, I've always made entities plural by using an
| apostrophe (e.g., "This field holds a list of
| SomeCoolObject's."). I think my train of thought was that it
| differentiates (better?) when the entity name happens to end
| with an 's'.
| zerocrates wrote:
| There are standard typographical conventions I don't always
| adhere to in the context of talking about code or other
| technical subjects. For example, the American standard is for
| punctuation that comes at the end of a quotation should be
| inside the closing quotation mark, "like this." I sometimes
| do the reverse, or even put a space before a period or comma,
| just to avoid possible confusion about what's actually part
| of the quotation and what's not.
|
| The apostrophe in the way you're using it here is something
| similar: you're accentuating that the actual name of the
| thing you're talking about is SomeCoolObject. Sometimes that
| kind of thing could matter (particularly think of when
| pluralizing a word changes its spelling beyond simply adding
| an "s" to the end). You might be better off just
| restructuring a sentence to avoid having to pluralize at all:
| "a list with members of type SomeCoolObject" or somesuch.
| causi wrote:
| It's a typographic error that's infuriatingly made its way into
| my own grammar and I have no idea why.
| bhupy wrote:
| These used to be so popular, that my circa 2003-2005 public
| school district's official website where we could find our
| homework assignments, social calendars, teacher phone numbers,
| etc had a cursor effect for cougar paws (honoring the school
| mascot).
| dustractor wrote:
| I did web design back when it was called webmaster, and every
| time we finished a site my boss would ask me to 'make it sparkle'
| and this is what she meant, every time. I would explain why I
| thought it was a bad idea but then I would add the js snippet and
| show her. She would clap her hands and jump with glee. I would
| deploy it. The customers loved it. Invariably, the next day I
| would remove it because what mattered is whether the customer's
| customers liked it, and half the time they would think it was a
| virus and the other half were using IE 1.0 so they couldn't see
| it.
| jbaczuk wrote:
| These might still be popular if you have a user base for whom the
| 90s is nostalgic!
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| To be truly nostalgic they would have to take longer to load, and
| slow down my whole computer. If I trusted the page enough to
| enable javascript, which was so rare to begin with in the 90s.
| Heck, I rarely enabled images until at least 2000 when I got a
| cable modem.
|
| That said, this is fun and impressive. I wouldn't even know where
| to start with something like this, I just bookmarked with the
| intention of reading through the code later but I probably never
| will.
| fortran77 wrote:
| There was a whole startup, "Comet Cursor" whose goal was to get
| people to install a plugin (that spied on you, of course) to get
| enhanced cursors. I was working for a Big Media company in the
| early 2000s when the Comet Cursor execs managed to convince our
| execs that it would be a good idea to accept money from Comet
| Cursor in exchange for forcing downloads on our customers.
| kalupa wrote:
| Ah, the whimsy. I do miss the 90s era of the internet. so full of
| promise and silly fun
| woevdbz wrote:
| The last website I saw with a perfect mouse cursor:
| https://thekebabshop.com/. See if you can resist slicing the logo
| with that big knife.
| Bellend wrote:
| I wanted to slice it big time but I didn't know what logo??
| p4bl0 wrote:
| So much memories of DHTML and JS tips sharing websites come back
| to my mind when using this page ! It immediately reminded me of
| frames with customized scrollbars and marquee text too =).
| xnx wrote:
| The "Ghost" effect brought back strong memories of passive LCD
| screens circa ~1996.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| I miss Classic Mac OS extensions which added whimsical things
| like this.
|
| As I remember there were a few cursor trail extensions, as well
| as an extension that added physics to dragged icons (you could
| even throw them!), an extension that turned all on-screen text
| upside-down, etc. Not the least bit useful but _fun_.
|
| The Classic Mac OS extension model was a security and stability
| disaster but it was unparalleled in terms of how it let third
| party devs tweak the OS. Even modern Linux desktops can't
| compare.
| dddddaviddddd wrote:
| > an extension that added physics to dragged icons (you could
| even throw them!)
|
| I remember this, what a joy! http://www.wildbits.com/gravite/
| Lammy wrote:
| Cursor trails were a godsend for '90s PowerBook users with
| passive-matrix LCDs where it was very easy to lose the cursor
| visually as it moved:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_matrix_addressing
|
| See also: Those little widgets like XEyes that always look
| toward the cursor's current coordinates.
| reaperducer wrote:
| My memory is that this still existed in modern macOS not too
| long ago, as an accessibility option.
| rikroots wrote:
| I love these - a fantastic piece of retro coding!
|
| My only criticism would be that the code uses
| `element.appendChild(canvas);` - if the element already contains
| child elements then the generated canvas is going to go over
| them, blocking any user interaction associated with them - for
| example, links. I think `element.prepend(canvas)` would give a
| better UX?
| omoikane wrote:
| Is there a way for HTML+CSS to capture what the user's cursor
| actually looks like, in case if a website wants to perfect the
| "ghost" effect without replacing the cursor image?
| Minor49er wrote:
| No, there isn't a way to capture this under normal
| circumstances. The best a site can do is to detect the client's
| platform and use an image of the default cursor for it to try
| to get close
| autoexec wrote:
| One thing I loved about the internet back when these types of
| effects were popular was how collaborative and innovative web
| design was. People would see something they liked on someone
| else's website and just add it to their own. It might be an
| animated gif, a cursor effect, a background image, or a site's
| entire layout. Everything was fair game.
|
| You'd see something cool on one site and suddenly it'd be all
| over the place and then it'd eventually get edited until it
| became something new that got spread around again.
|
| Even though everyone was shamelessly copying everyone else the
| effect was that websites were very diverse yet familiar. Then
| people started using social media where they didn't even have to
| learn to copy/paste HTML and everything slowly became very bland
| and generic.
| hackernewds wrote:
| hard to conclude there is a lot less creativity being shared
| today on social media, than the haphazard, disparate websites
| in the 90s. I remember pages full of glitter, and hardly
| readable nor user-friendly marquee text with blue underlines in
| technicolor with no synchrony on how to navigate them
| autoexec wrote:
| The content now is just as creative as it ever was, it's just
| now all displayed in one of a few of social media's uniform
| sanitized templates.
|
| While there were plenty of sites back in the day that were
| basically unreadable all kinds of popular layouts and color
| schemes rose to the top and gained popularity. I wonder how
| things would have evolved if it had continued.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| This brings me back to my childhood and building web pages when
| JavaScript elements to add whimsy and whatnot to the page.
|
| Was it particularly attractive? No. Was there much function
| (except for a few screen types and maybe cursor styles, not
| really). Was it fun and did it make the internet feel exciting
| and like a truly new and unique medium? Hell yes.
|
| Love seeing this stuff preserved.
|
| And add me to the list of people that now misses skeuomorphism
| from the aughts and the Delicious Generation of Mac apps.
| Lickable icons and interfaces. I still love them, mostly because
| it reminds me of when software had personality.
|
| That's the thing about the late-90s to early 2000s web aesthetic:
| it had personality.
|
| I love stark and clean Swiss-influenced designs as much any
| anyone else. But software, websites, and hardware was always best
| when it had personality.
| leokennis wrote:
| I think all design trends point to us having passed the peak of
| "flat" design.
|
| For example I think iOS is a big trendsetter and it's less flat
| and boring than a few years ago (however still too white and
| boring).
| checkyoursudo wrote:
| I would sometimes not get apps that didn't have good enough
| skeuomorphised icons. Like, if you're a flashlight app that
| can't even convince me you're a flashlight app then pfft
| begone.
| smm11 wrote:
| Very early OS X versions had a fairly simple way to revert the
| GUI back to a NeXT or Win look. Reason being, OS X was Openstep,
| which was NeXT, and part of Openstep was integration with NT at
| the time, hence the GUI toolkit.
|
| Neither of the non-OS X interfaces were very functional at all. I
| always wondered why those throwaway parts will still lying
| around.
| racl101 wrote:
| I like the idea of adding the ghost effect one and making our
| clients think they are tripping balls.
| neilv wrote:
| Also, xneko and oneko. (Cartoon cat chases your "mouse" cursor,
| catches it, goes to sleep on it, you move the cursor, cat is
| alerted, repeat.)
|
| http://www.daidouji.com/oneko/
| mike_hock wrote:
| On X11, the cursor is only a mouse when you move it over the
| cat. Otherwise the cat chases your normal cursor.
| makeworld wrote:
| Can be done for your website too:
| https://github.com/adryd325/oneko.js
| mfkp wrote:
| Demo: https://www.cssscript.com/demo/cat-follow-cursor-oneko/
| rzzzt wrote:
| Another one which includes the sheep that walks on window
| borders: https://adrianotiger.github.io/desktopPet/Pets/
| samwillis wrote:
| Opened the comments and immediately cmd-f for "sheep", so
| pleased other people remember it. I remember being given it
| by a friend at school on a floppy disk...
| worik wrote:
| Really good in large/multi screen set ups. Or dirty screens
| crtasm wrote:
| Fans of neko and Untitled Goose Game will enjoy Desktop Goose
|
| https://samperson.itch.io/desktop-goose
| gumby wrote:
| oh god please no.
| wmab wrote:
| Takes me back to the Geocities days!
| lefstathiou wrote:
| Long live the creativity, originality and whimsicalness of the
| internet of the 90s...
| WorldMaker wrote:
| I particularly like the ESM examples in the README of this
| project for feeling like an interesting modern take for how some
| of the old 90s JS libraries used to feel. Many of the 90s
| libraries often weren't distributed as JS files to add to a
| SCRIPT SRC but as SCRIPT blocks to copy and paste with big
| comments denoting things you might want to tweak, giving more of
| that feel of "ownership" of the JS and that "everything is
| tweakable", not just JS lives on remote CDNs and is imported all
| or nothing and nowhere near as tweakable. ESM feels like it
| starts to bring some of that back and head towards a best of both
| worlds: composable pieces imported from remote URLs and tweakable
| script blocks to copy, paste, and then make your own.
|
| I'm probably biased from my position of already knowing ESM well
| at this point having pushed a lot of my own modern tech stacks
| towards it, but I'd like to imagine 90s teen me would have found
| ESM blocks exciting.
| kator wrote:
| When can we get these added to iTerm2?
| worik wrote:
| I want these on my desktop...
| mseepgood wrote:
| Emojis didn't exist back in the 90s. This is an anachronism.
| laumars wrote:
| Some did. They were called "smilies".
| Minor49er wrote:
| No, but the same thing was achievable with GIFs under the
| "DHTML" banner (the "D" meaning "Dynamic", which typically just
| meant "JavaScript and CSS"). Custom cursor effects were really
| popular demos
|
| Here are some pages from that era that show off some of these:
|
| http://www.javascriptkit.com/script/script2/simpleimagetrail...
|
| http://www.javascriptkit.com/script/script2/simpleimagetrail...
|
| http://www.mf2fm.com/rv/dhtmlbubblecursor.php
|
| http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex11/customcursor.htm
| arriu wrote:
| I can't believe these actually used to be popular but they were.
| I wonder if their over-the-top nature made learning how to use a
| computer mouse a little more fun.
| dwringer wrote:
| I always use trails, along with the largest pointer I can set
| and inverted coloration. It makes it a lot easier for me to
| always find the mouse at a glance when I move it slightly. I
| didn't always do so in the past, but the move to 4k clinched
| it.
|
| Windows has a bug(?) with inverted colors combined with trails,
| though, where sometimes the cursor double-inverts when it's at
| rest. I consider this sort of a feature, though, since I don't
| care where it is if I'm not actively using it.
| hbn wrote:
| On Mac if you wiggle the cursor around it'll become giant for
| a second to show you where it is. Occasionally comes in handy
| drewzero1 wrote:
| I love the inverted colors, it really helps keep the cursor
| visible in the bleak wasteland of Windows 10's UI.
| flir wrote:
| It's not the users that were learning, it was the (amateur)
| designers. (See also: the 80s DTP revolution).
| dymk wrote:
| I miss webpages with googly eyes that would follow your mouse
| on the screen. What a sense of whimsy.
| rabuse wrote:
| I believe Imguror had something like that for their 404 page
| with some animals following the cursor with their eyes.
| Always enjoyed that.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| Didn't GitHub do that too? I seem to remember a framed
| picture of a giraffe in a top hat (imgur) and an octopus
| cat in the Tattooine desert (GitHub).
| amenod wrote:
| If you are on Linux, just run xeyes. Classic. :)
| TakeBlaster16 wrote:
| xeyes was another wayland casualty sadly. I hope someone
| figures out a way to build wayland_eyes
| bitwize wrote:
| For security reasons that's outside the scope of the core
| protocol. But don't worry, all it would take is for
| someone to develop an eye-following protocol and for the
| compositors to implement it.
|
| It really is better, folks. Daniel Stone talk!
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| And don't forgot Xeyes
|
| And like Solitaire's "it's a tool to teach mouse use", I
| always thought the "it's a utility to track the mouse, not
| just a bit of whimsy" was a bit of retconing, but I have no
| real proof.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Ghost was possible on the desktop as well, IIRC. I wonder if it
| was intended as an accessibility feature or for new users who
| had trouble keeping track of the mouse.
| achairapart wrote:
| I used to wonder the same then one day I tried LSD[0], and it
| was another illumination. By then, I'm sure the origin of the
| cursor trail was some trippy programmer trying to recreate
| the same effect he saw "under the influence".
|
| [0]: I swear, just once!
| bee_rider wrote:
| A different form of cursor ghosting would occur when
| certain GUI programs got stuck. So it might just be that
| somebody saw that and thought it was neat.
| powerhour wrote:
| Yup. I am glad we've moved on, at least on windows, to
| double-tapping left ctrl to highlight the cursor. It's a
| pleasant effect.
|
| macOS's shake-the-mouse gesture isn't as nice. It's such a
| "violent" gesture that it feels like it will just reinforce
| the feeling of frustration for users.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Note that left ctrl trick is still just a PowerToy in
| Windows. That's one I'm surprised hasn't graduated to in
| box given its general usefulness for accessibility and
| overall simplicity.
| powerhour wrote:
| Oh dang. Thanks, I didn't realize that.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Exploring mouse options for something else and stumbled
| upon a reminder there is an in box feature for it. It's
| off-by-default and the changes that Power Tool makes are:
| switch from single Left Ctrl to double Left Ctrl, and
| switches from classic Windows "wave of rings" visual (it
| expands a bunch of rings out from the pointer as a very
| simple animation) to the "Spotlight" mechanic that dims
| the screen except for a circle around the pointer.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| macOS's is discoverable by the very action one might take
| trying to find the cursor even without knowing about it,
| while Windows' isn't. Source: I found the macOS one by
| accident, but didn't know about the Windows double-tap-ctrl
| thing until reading your post. Most likely I'll forget the
| ctrl trick by tomorrow, but shake-the-mouse was stuck in my
| brain the instant I found it.
| dwringer wrote:
| I don't really like the idea of double-tapping control
| either, for much the same reason, but wiggling the mouse
| seems gentler. I still use trails, though; I'll take all
| the help I can get.
| vore wrote:
| Or maybe it's useful for when you do get frustrated and
| can't find the mouse cursor :)
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Trails _were_ an accessibility feature in early GUI
| environments (based on accident of early GUI renderers; even
| Windows 3.1 used to make trails "naturally" on an over-taxed
| machine when repaints were taking too long), but I think most
| of the uses of them, especially in the early days of the web a
| lot of it was just "personality". That OG Geocities feel of
| finding a bunch of interesting JS snippets, copy and pasting,
| and maybe lightly tweaking the ones that spoke to you and seem
| like the coolest thing to add to your fan page for your current
| favorite cartoon or local roller coaster.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| Not to mention that early laptops had LCDs with very slow
| refresh rates, which could make a moving pointer very
| difficult to track. The trail gave an indication of where the
| pointer had been and was going as it was traveling.
| pjerem wrote:
| > Trails were an accessibility feature in early GUI
| environments
|
| I'm pretty sure the option still exists on Windows 11
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Yes, but it got removed from overt Accessibility Features
| at some point Vista-ish and is hidden as an "additional
| option" that's three or four clicks away from "Ease of
| Access".
| kungfufrog wrote:
| I would pay money for a MacOS native rainbow cursor.
| ogurechny wrote:
| > for your modern browser
|
| I don't know which modern features might be required for that
| potentially breathtaking presentation, because for me it stops
| running at the first occurrence of optional chaining operator.
| According to caniuse.com, ?. has been supported for just two
| years, and is still only available for 92% of users. The Web is
| three decades old, but let's ignore that, because everything must
| not exist for more than a year before being replaced with Next
| Generation Thing. Lifespan of a butterfly is our true goal!
|
| I guess self-promotion of web developers also requires them to
| compete in shouting at the top of their lungs "I don't give a
| fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck about people who have to deal with websites I
| make". The boldest get hired.
| mikestew wrote:
| I'll start with, wow, that's pretty cool and entertaining. As
| another commenter said, a reminder of the whimsicalness of the
| 90s internet.
|
| _sigh_ , then along came Comet Cursor to remind us why we can't
| have nice things:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Cursor
|
| The "can't have nice things" part comes from the tracking that
| came along with it. Comet Cursor was a pioneer of what would
| become the modern web!
| HeckFeck wrote:
| > The company was criticized for secretly tracking users who
| installed the software, each of whom was given a unique serial
| number
|
| Doesn't seem too out of the line nowadays, does it? Even
| Microsoft recommended users uninstall the program. Wouldn't it
| be wonderful if they had kept their distance from such
| practices?
| tombert wrote:
| My parents were so mad at me when I installed Comet Cursor on
| the family computer.
|
| I was 9 years old, and I think I had grabbed it from a shady
| site that had modified it to stuff it with additional adware
| and malware...the computer went _really_ slow after I installed
| it, but I had a totally badass cursor that looked like it was
| being electrocuted, so overall I think it was a fair trade.
| inetsee wrote:
| "the computer went really slow after I installed it"
|
| This version also appears to be using a lot of system
| resources. Firefox on Linux is idling at about 6% CPU while
| reading HN. Go to that web site and the usage goes up to 80%
| to 90%. Come back here and CPU goes back down to 6% or so.
| mikestew wrote:
| Interesting, but no repro on macOS/Safari. macOS/Firefox,
| however, will take up about 50% between the "Firefox"
| process and a "Firefox isolated web content" process.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| As the above points out, that "shady site" was possibly just
| the official Comet Cursor website. They themselves _were_ an
| adware company and a weird, direct bridge from 90s "whimsy"
| web to modern ad tracking and adware.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| I recall Cursor Mania which was a similar idea. It bundled
| Smiley Central which was a necessity to out-smiley your
| contacts on MSN messenger. It also prefigured emojis. And it
| almost certainly came with a generous helping of malware.
|
| Glory days, nonetheless.
| tootie wrote:
| One of the founders of Comet was a friend of a friend. We
| chatted about it a bit. They really seemed like earnest folks
| who stumbled on a way to monetize virality in the early days of
| the internet. There was absolutely no framework for ethics of
| data collection and even they seemed kinda shocked at how easy
| it was to do back then. I think once the money was flowing in,
| it was too hard to stop.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Malware like this used to be so common; software that did
| something useful and then on the side also installed some
| horrible user-hostile thing. Adware and search hijackers, too.
| Fortunately that's mostly ended on desktop but it's a constant
| battle on mobile devices still.
| walrus01 wrote:
| comet cursor, and bonzi buddy, and all of its ilk
|
| the beginning of the presently ongoing shitshow of tracking and
| privacy violations to earn revenue.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| Bonzi Buddy was particularly insidious because it was so
| close to being useful/fun and instead was just glorified
| malware.
|
| I desperately want a Bonzi Buddy plushie, however. Just for
| the lolz.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| You can buy a Bonzi Buddy NFT from the original authors,
| which is _somewhat_ the same!
| user3939382 wrote:
| RealPlayer lol
| hackernewds wrote:
| _daisyyyy_ _daissyyy_
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-08-29 23:00 UTC)