• 2 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • It creates a clear heirarchy of information too. The system owns the title bar, so any operations there are system operations.

    At one point browsers did something similar for security awareness-- real permission prompts, etc. were set a few pixels over into the main UI to establist that they were “real” and not part of the page content.

    Most of the time, we’re not so starved for pixels that we have tp be stealing from the title bar.

    Hell, we lived thtough 640x480 desktops without even the cheat of hamburger menus.





  • We have an entire universe (from snaps up to univere-scale k8s setups) derived from “it works on my machine, so we’ll ship my machine”.

    How much bad software isn’t being shook out because it’s kept alive in a container with just the right dependencies to prevent it from activating bugs and bad assertions?


  • What problem does CSD solve? I’d think “some apps look and work differently” is a pretty bad tradeoff for “I want to cram custom stuff in the title bar which was more or less universally treated as owned-by-the-system for the first 35 years of GUIs at least?”

    GTK/GNOME seem to be making themselves actively hostile towards customization, which seems a great way to lose enthusiasts.


  • I believe the huge mistake in HTML wasn’t having some sort of element-level addressability.

    People went insane over “the page flashes for 15ms because we have to reload the header and footer and it doesn’t look NAAATIVE!” and the response was to SPA/AJAX everything, inviting a huge Turing-complete nightmare of possibilities when 95% of what peopleneed would be delivered with < form action=“blah” replace_with_response=“#foo” >

    That and a dearth of native widgets-- a < combobox > and a < menu > that worked like the system menus might have kept JavaScript as the sick oddity it should be.








  • I’m hoping for MacroSD. About the size of a 3.5" floppy so you won’t lose it easily.

    Seriously, it’s interesting that now that we have the tech to make a useful-capacity storage device the size of a credit card, we don’t. Not like those crappy giveaway flash drives printed with a card design, where they had a captive USB head and were 4x as thick as a card, but something with just contacts like a chip card, so you might need to use an external reader but it really preserves the wallet-size concept.

    I’d love to have a cheap 16GB card in my wallet with all my health records and a cryptographically signed copy of my will as a one-stop, no cloud required, emergency kit.




  • I tried pulling in the theming from there, and while it works miracles, I still want to do the three-headed dragon meme:

    • Real Motif apps
    • Qt5 apps (where there’s a Motif-like theme baked in)
    • GTK apps, which don’t honour the same fonts and the theme is far more divergent from the “real deal”

    There are a few other “Solaris 9” and “Perl Tk” lookalike themes that also come close, but they’re all sabotaged by GTK’s lack of bitmap font support (The old bitmap Helvetica is my go-to UI font)