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Ask HN: What are weird and/or novel ways to do web UIs?

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341–350 of 364 posts

Re: Ask HN: What are weird and/or novel ways to do web UIs?

#341

This is more of a joke answer, but r/ProgrammerHumour recently underwent a spate of submissions competing to come up with the wackiest and "wrong" ways to do common UI elements, such as the slider or phone number inputs. A small album of the best and worst of these submissions: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/6fdl8h/an_...

See also: https://www.reddit.com/r/badUIbattles/

Re: Ask HN: What are weird and/or novel ways to do web UIs?

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know what CPU my HTTP requests need?!

If your HTTP requests are high CPU and your doing standard crud type actions, there's something wrong with your codebase. High CPU tasks should be offloaded from the HTTP request into a queue.

Who said I was doing standard CRUD, and it seems like now you're defining HTTP requests as low-CPU activities just to make Lambda not fit explicitly. Nothing wrong with doing high-CPU activity in a request/response cycle if it's consistent and timely.

Re: Ask HN: What are weird and/or novel ways to do web UIs?

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your HTTP requests are high CPU and your doing standard crud type actions, there's something wrong with your codebase. High CPU tasks should be offloaded from the HTTP request into a queue.

Who said I was doing standard CRUD, and it seems like now you're defining HTTP requests as low-CPU activities just to make Lambda not fit explicitly. Nothing wrong with doing high-CPU activity in a request/response cycle if it's consistent and timely.

Sounds like in your case lambda might be a good fit? I'm not really sure because you're not really explaining your use case.

For the vast majority of crud based web apps that I've seen or worked on in the last decade, lambda would not have been a good fit. There's a lot of people drinking the serverless koolaid right now and applying it to scenarios that don't fit it well.

Re: Ask HN: What are weird and/or novel ways to do web UIs?

#345

I once worked at Chase Manhattan Bank and one of their internal networking teams had a web site for wiring requests. They didn’t want to work too hard so their UI was designed to make data entry as slow as possible, mostly by using huge multi-level drop down lists where the slightest twitch would make them collapse and you would have to start over navigating through them, repeat a dozen times for every run of cable,…

Heroic! Lotus Notes was such a pile of junk. Every time I used it for the simplest task, the combative UI would cause my blood pressure to spike up. I would calm myself down by imagining the blissful life of the ex JPMorganChase IT boss who greenlighted the purchase, living off his giant kickback on some Caribbean island.

My favourite Lotus Notes fail was circa 2008, when the menu item for "Mark message as read" was next to "Mark all as read", which from memory was not undo-able.

It took just one slip of the finger to...

Re: Ask HN: What are weird and/or novel ways to do web UIs?

#346

I once worked at Chase Manhattan Bank and one of their internal networking teams had a web site for wiring requests. They didn’t want to work too hard so their UI was designed to make data entry as slow as possible, mostly by using huge multi-level drop down lists where the slightest twitch would make them collapse and you would have to start over navigating through them, repeat a dozen times for every run of cable,…

>(dates this) Unfortunately, it doesn't. https://www.hcltechsw.com/wps/portal/products/products-home/...

In 2015 I was working at a place (40k-employee multinational) that still used Notes and windows xp.

Re: Ask HN: What are weird and/or novel ways to do web UIs?

#347
post #240
post #7

Go spend 5 minutes here on pc desktop. http://cyberspaceandtime.com/Gaano9Y6KAU.video+related I came across this site a few weeks ago. And it's quite unlike anything I've seen. And try to inspect the site using browser inspector. It's a very different ui than I've ever seen before.

Seems completely broken in Firefox and Safari, and mostly broken in Chrome/Chromium - just what browser does the site work with?

It works for me in Firefox on Ubuntu without javascript

Re: Ask HN: What are weird and/or novel ways to do web UIs?

#348

I created this SVG-based graph layout GUI [1] for our learning media website LunchBox Sessions [2]. The graph lets us visually express the prerequisites of each session. Using SVG meant I could do some fun animations to hide the load time when opening a session. [1] https://lunchboxsessions.com/explore/hydraulics [2] https://lunchboxsessions.com

That's pretty spiffy! How'd you do the layout? I was looking at elkjs [1] and the Klay layout algorithm to do something similar. [1]: https://github.com/OpenKieler/elkjs

Thanks! It's manually laid out using a drag-and-drop editor. I've never met an automatic graph layout algorithm I liked the aesthetic of.

Re: Ask HN: What are weird and/or novel ways to do web UIs?

#349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who said I was doing standard CRUD, and it seems like now you're defining HTTP requests as low-CPU activities just to make Lambda not fit explicitly. Nothing wrong with doing high-CPU activity in a request/response cycle if it's consistent and timely.

Sounds like in your case lambda might be a good fit? I'm not really sure because you're not really explaining your use case. For the vast majority of crud based web apps that I've seen or worked on in the last decade, lambda would not have been a good fit. There's a lot of people drinking the serverless koolaid right now and applying it to scenarios that don't fit it well.

Just sounds like you're drinking the same koolaid, just the opposite flavor.

Have you actually built a lambda backed web service? Guessing no, or you'd know better than to complain about price. Plenty of better arguments to be had than the one lambda actually does decently on...

Re: Ask HN: What are weird and/or novel ways to do web UIs?

#350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No! It cannot be that Agresso was already around at that time. I still have to work with that horrific system, even though it is webbased now. It's still a horrible experience.

> There was an appalling timesheet system called Agresso, the most counterintuitive Windows GUI I ever encountered. I love the idea that there was a terrible timesheet system called Agresso. And that it's still around today! Some things do change with time. If this system was created today, I imagine it would be named something like quiesso or daisy.

Actually I used to work for the company that makes it. It changed names some years ago and is now called "Unit4 Business World"

Small world

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