TechTakes

these are very good points

for some reason I can’t stop thinking about a web app I use daily that randomly plays a confetti animation when I interact normally with it, then pops a notification that reads “you just saw an animation! we’ll play these from time to time.” and it displays that notification every time there’s an animation with no way to turn either one off, and I can’t remember why but either the animation or the notification is implemented so poorly it actively interferes with my workflow for a few seconds

the phrase "corporate mandated fun" popped into my head as I watched this site, and I think it ties in with what you said here

re-reading this after coffee - need to avoid writing opinions so early in the morning

you know more about web design than these web designers

check out their main page, cause it gets so much worse

also did you notice that on load every page does a fake loading-style animation regardless of whether or not everything is already in cache? they somehow ported Flash’s loading jank into CSS and I fucking love it. this is the kind of talent we need to reskin awful.systems

the shift from the hamburger menu is because the scrollbar disappears. They could easily fix this by making the :root {width: 100dvw} which makes it 100% dynamic width - meaning it ignores browser elements like scrollbars.

but the site is drupal so there's a good chance this is a modified theme

I need to torrent this.

the experience between mobile and desktop was remarkably consistent for me. somehow the bad ideas port over perfectly, they’re just larger

it definitely varies based on the person but roughly:

• it’s hardware and software you can fuck with. the schematic of an Amiga is so simple that it can fit in your head, but its custom video chips are so flexible that folks are still finding new techniques to get beautiful results out of them (I’ll come back to this post when I have time and link something relatively recent from the Amiga demoscene that shows this). in short, it’s a system designed from the ground up to render beautiful graphics on an old school CRT
• likewise, the OS is extremely modular and easy to modify, though it’s not open source (it really should be — the vultures in the retro space you’ve heard me complain about ensure it isn’t). all of the data structures and APIs the OS exposes are very visible due to its architecture and lack of memory protection. not having memory protection sounds shitty, but the Amiga does its best to turn that into a strength; there’s a bunch of support in the OS for fucking around, finding out, and recovering afterwards, and there’s also a wonderful feature parity between the Amiga’s GUI, CLI (AmigaDOS, a mix of someone’s memories of Unix and CP/M that’s actually surprisingly pleasant to use), and scripting languages
• the platform has a lot of support for banging on the hardware directly without the OS running if you want maximum efficiency, and there’s even a modern framework (WHDLoad) that’ll paravirtualize your OS so you can run a game that takes over the hardware then exit back to your running OS afterwards
• it’s a very easy retro platform to modernize. my Amiga has an inexpensive accelerator card that uses a Raspberry Pi to emulate an impossibly fast 68k CPU, hard drives, 720p graphics card (which the OS uses, but games still use the authentic graphics hardware), networking, and a shitload (128MB) of RAM. it turns out you can do even more tricks on the 1985 graphics hardware in the Amiga if you give it an impossibly fast CPU and hard drive and a shitload of RAM
• it’s a good gaming platform, though try it in an emulator if you only want that
• “nostalgia!” is the common reason you hear from the shitheads in the retro scene trying to charge you way too much for old hardware. I didn’t grow up with these computers so that’s bullshit, I just think they’re cool as fuck
• new shit is still coming out for this platform? other than 68k accelerator tech only getting better (now that PowerPC is finally dead), AmigaOS 3.2.2 only came out this year and has a bunch of improvements. it’s the sequel to AmigaOS 3.9 and AmigaOS 4 (yes there’s a story behind this)

this concludes the prepared Amiga rant you have fallen victim to

I know this link doesn't work anymore but please tell me someone remembers this