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Show HN: The current sky at your approximate location, as a CSS gradient

sky.dlazaro.ca

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Re: Show HN: The current sky at your approximate location, as a CSS gradient

#151

Post by GuardianCaveman »

ryandrake wrote: post #7

Awesome. I remember much earlier in my career I was working on a 3D turn-by-turn navigation software, and one of my tasks was to draw the sky in the background. The more senior guy on the team said, just draw a blue rectangle during the day and a dark gray one at night and call it job done. Of course, I had to do it the hard way, so I looked up the relevant literature on sky rendering based on the environment, latitu…

I identify so much with your sentiment and this type of overthinking overbuilding .

Re: Show HN: The current sky at your approximate location, as a CSS gradient

#152

Post by Theodores »

dnlzro wrote: post #80
cloudfudge wrote: post #74

As an old-timer who's not up on all the latest whiz-bang web stuff, I have to ask what is the astro/cloudflare/wrangler magic that allows the following to work: const { latitude = "0", longitude = "0" } = Astro.locals.runtime.cf || {}; I gather you're using some cloudflare feature wrapped in astro to provide lat/long but I don't see the actual plumbing that gets it to you (and I did try to spelunk through a decent am…

There is no visible plumbing because it kinda is magic! Astro provides adapters for different server runtimes (e.g., Vercel, Cloudflare, Netlify), and it's basically just plug and play. The Cloudflare adapter exposes a bunch of bindings [1] through `Astro.locals.runtime`, which can be accessed during each request. The `cf` binding contains incoming request properties [2], including latitude and longitude. These bindi…

Any ideas on how to do this without the Cloud flare magic, so entirely in the client? Just based on time will suffice, with latitude approximated to somewhere such as London?

Re: Show HN: The current sky at your approximate location, as a CSS gradient

#155

Post by alwa »

woah wrote: post #88
jbverschoor wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whipping down the innovator with the stupidity whip. Great management

It sounds like the developer spent a lot of time implementing something that nobody wanted. Drawing the sky accurately may be cool, but it wasn't required in this case. It's also not innovation. It's been done before. This is like if you were renovating your house and the drywall guy spends a huge amount of time building up round corners, but you just wanted regular square corners. Then on some drywall forum they're…

And, from the sound of it, the developer confused truth with beauty. Sometimes we’d prefer to see the sky the way we wish it were rather than the way it is.

That’s an aesthetic call, not a “who can do the math” call.

“Good news, I accurately simulated the particulate load in the local atmosphere—so now you authentically can’t read the text on a given smoggy winter morning!”

(FWIW, grace for management decisions notwithstanding, I think what gp did is awesome, and would switch on full realism mode every time :)

Re: Show HN: The current sky at your approximate location, as a CSS gradient

#156

Post by nkrisc »

ryandrake wrote: post #7

Awesome. I remember much earlier in my career I was working on a 3D turn-by-turn navigation software, and one of my tasks was to draw the sky in the background. The more senior guy on the team said, just draw a blue rectangle during the day and a dark gray one at night and call it job done. Of course, I had to do it the hard way, so I looked up the relevant literature on sky rendering based on the environment, latitu…

That sounds really cool but I have to reluctantly agree with the senior: a cartoonish day/night sky is better than a half-implemented realistic one. I say “half-implemented” because it sounds as though yours didn’t account for local weather and cloud cover, which is reasonable but then incomplete. Even if you did, well, it’s turn-by-turn navigation. I expect the sky color to be selected for ideal contrast with the important UI elements to reduce the time spent looking at it while driving.

Re: Show HN: The current sky at your approximate location, as a CSS gradient

#157

Post by jbverschoor »

philipallstar wrote: post #92
jbverschoor wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's exactly the thing that makes software "delightful". It's also a huge boost to the developer's appreciation, motivation, productivity, care for the product. But yeah, if you only care about checking the feature boxes.. Go ahead, make shit software with miserable people, but be sure to prepare to go out of business.

The point is a real skybox is not great for satnav software. It's probably actually worse than a stylised mode, with a predictable colour background for anything that's going to sit on top of it.

That's exactly not the point. Where do you think innovation comes from?

It comes from tinkering.

Re: Show HN: The current sky at your approximate location, as a CSS gradient

#158

Post by jbverschoor »

cyberax wrote: post #100
ryandrake wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A foundational, core theme about making commercial software, that repeats over and over and I slowly got accustomed to is: companies really don't want these kinds of micro-innovations. 90% of companies are just looking at their competitors, making a checklist out of those products, and asking engineers to check the boxes and go home. They don't care about little details, about craftsmanship and polish, about lint war…

> They don't care about little details, about craftsmanship and polish, about lint warnings, about "oh, that's a nice touch," or even quality beyond "will the customer return the product?" I worked at large companies, and there are reasons beyond that. I've been on the both sides of this fence. Senior engineers feel the pain of supporting all these features. You created a new streaming API prototype that provides a g…

Sure.. but all there prototypes don't have to be released. It's part of innovation. And maybe you'll even find a new product or a competitive edge.

Re: Show HN: The current sky at your approximate location, as a CSS gradient

#159

Post by carlosjobim »

wkjagt wrote: post #145
crazygringo wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why specifications are important, and why design is important. The reality is that we have certain conventions that are immediately understandable, and that too much visual complexity results in confusion rather than clarity. If the sky is hazy white when I expect it to be blue, I'm confused as to whether it's the sky or if the map is still loading. It's adding cognitive complexity for no reason. Stars simila…

Also, any fanciness you add in your product is something you need to then maintain. Even after the developer that built it leaves the company.

It takes thousands of years for the stars to have changed positions in a noticeable way, and my best guess is that the customers will not use their car GPS for so long that this will bother them.

Re: Show HN: The current sky at your approximate location, as a CSS gradient

#160

Post by crazygringo »

carlosjobim wrote: post #159
wkjagt wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, any fanciness you add in your product is something you need to then maintain. Even after the developer that built it leaves the company.

It takes thousands of years for the stars to have changed positions in a noticeable way, and my best guess is that the customers will not use their car GPS for so long that this will bother them.

Very funny, but in case you're serious, it's not the stars changing...

...it's the software frameworks. A new screen size. A different color depth. A bug when the graphics library is upgraded for antialiasing. Etc.

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