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Ambient Co-Presence
Creating a subtle, peripheral, and synchronous sense of shared space and context on the web
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 147 posts.
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Fake Trees: Using Indents for Simpler UIs
This is a technique I’ve used in actual for-pay software, but most recently in my text adventure game editor, Hiss .
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Smallest Typeface
Anders de Flon. Type design information compiled and maintained by Luc Devroye.
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CSS Is Fun Again
CSS has been undergoing a quiet renaissance lately. Lots of big features which previously required an external tool to use, are now native parts of the language, and its growing more and more all the time…
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How to (and how not to) fix color banding
Discovering color banding solutions & Smooth gradients with a clever Noise one-liner by SLEDGEHAMMER Games
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Website search hurts my feelings
Searching and displaying results isn't hard, why do so many websites suck at it?
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WebP is so great except it's not (2021)
I’m a responsible web designer, and as such, since WordPress (finally) accepts media uploads of image/webp MIME type and since all web browsers newer than …
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The UX of delivering parcels
I shipped identical boxes, less than a mile, with multiple delivery companies — one was seized by the police. This is the UX of delivering parcels.
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Should you add screenshots to documentation?
Screenshots in documentation can be a contentious topic — some people really like them and think they add a lot of value, while others dislike them due to the maintenance burden and accessibility issues. So what should you do?
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Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers
Our third film is from 1995, directed by Iain Softley. Hackers is about a group of teenage computer hackers, of the ethical / playful type who are driven by curiosity and cause no harm — well, not …
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It's weird how design systems are so rote, yet so difficult
Reflecting on investing in design systems
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Modern iOS Navigation Patterns
An unofficial bonus chapter for the iOS Human Interface Guidelines: Learn how to structure iPhone apps with drill-downs, modals, pyramids, sequences, and more.
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Dynamic music and sound techniques for video games
The only aspect of game development I’ve not attempted myself is the music. I mostly use royalty free music of Japanese origin (just because I dig their vibe...
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Shader Park Is Kinda Neat
Projects, experiments and toys by Rafał Pastuszak
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Making noisy SVGs
Adding noise texture with only code
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The `hanging-punctuation property` in CSS
(I did a Twitter thread on this a while back, against my better judgment, and now moving to a proper blog.) The hanging-punctuation property in CSS is almost a no-brainer. The classic example is a …
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Wealth Systems in RPGs
How some RPGs get coins wrong: they matter a lot until they matter not at all. It’s fun to play until your PCs are rich, but it’s even more fun to be able to buy things with those riches. Absorbing…
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Making a font
This month I decided to learn how to make a font to use in my comic hakum . Previously, I was drawing the text digitally with my pen tablet. The result was fine, but sometimes difficult to read(the text would grow and shrink often in one page). I didn't want to use an existing font, so I decided to make one based on…
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An Interactive Guide to CSS Grid
CSS Grid is an incredibly powerful tool for building layouts on the web, but like all powerful tools, there's a significant learning curve. In this tutorial, we'll build a mental model for how CSS Grid works and how we can use it effectively. I'll share the biggest 💡 lightbulb moments I've had in my own learning…
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The Decline of Usability: Revisited
Three years ago, I wrote a rant about the problems of our current UI paradigm. The complaints I voiced were hardly new or unique, neither was the text what I'd consider my best writing. It was, honestly, mostly a way to blow off steam. It seems I struck a nerve, though, because it's proven to be one of the most…
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Map of Space Invader Mosaics in Paris
The mosaics marked as flashed are stored locally. They are preserved between visits but not synced between devices. You can download and backup/restore them as needed.
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Is this radical redesign of GIMP possible now?
Glimpse NX didn't have a great solution for missing menu, but this new 3D CAD application has
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Early computer art by Barbara Nessim (1984)
Whilst searching for something else entirely I stumbled across these images and was struck by just how beautiful they are. The September 1984 (Vol 9, No 10) ...
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Don't disable buttons
One of the most common accessibility issues I find (and fix) on client projects is dynamically disabled form buttons when a form is being submitted. Today I want to talk about why developers do it, why it’s bad, and what you can do instead. Let’s dig in! Why developers disable buttons Typically, I see the pattern used…
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What does and doesn't matter about Apple shooting their October event on iPhone
You’re somewhere on the spectrum of occasionally shooting video on your iPhone to a professional-ish video maker with some gear, and you see at the end of Apple’s October “Scary Fast” event announcing new Macs with M3 silicon that the entire event was “Shot on iPhone.”
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Real-time dreamy Cloudscapes with Volumetric Raymarching
This article is a deep dive into my experimentations with Volumetric rendering and how to leverage it to render beautiful raymarched cloudscapes in React Three Fiber and WebGL. In it, I walk you through everything from the basics of Volumetric Raymarching to the techniques used in video games to render physically…
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How to Make Your Own Spooky Magic Eye Pictures (Autostereograms)
The simple standalone C++ code that goes with this post and makes autostereograms, can be found at The 1990s! They felt like a wasteland of culture at the time, but looking back, there was hyper co…
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Amiga ASCII Art
My thesis on Amiga ASCII art translated to English.
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Hong Kong Locations in Ghost in the Shell
When film director Mamoru Oshii was looking for a model of the city of the future for his seminal 1995 animated film adaptation of Ghost in the Shell (based on the manga by Masamune Shirow), h…
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Being picky about a CSS reset for fun
Just days before Andy revamped his (more) Modern CSS Reset, Dave and I were line-by-lining it on ShopTalk Show. Mouthblogging is fun and all, but so is Writemouthblogging, known colloquially as …