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Ambient CSS v3 – Blender meets CSS

ambientcss.vercel.app

11–20 of 104 posts

Re: Ambient CSS v3 – Blender meets CSS

#11

We used to do this during the Web 2.0 era with PNGs, GIFs and `progid:DXImageTransform` because back then you couldn't do it with standard CSS alone. Then as CSS (and MS!) evolved to enable it, the world moved on to flat UIs. It's ironic, isn't it?

Remember motiongerm and the whole sleek 60fps flash design thingamabob? Bespoke interfaces everywhere

Re: Ambient CSS v3 – Blender meets CSS

#13
post #10

Reminds me of VST GUIs, looks great! But, like other commenters have noted, I think a number of these controls might be desktop only, which is totally fine. There’s too much UI stuff centered around mobile anyway these days

Counterpoint: I hate VST GUIs. They're often skeuomorphic hell.

They love fiddly round knobs which are terrible to control with a mouse or touchpad, and are bad for accessibility. They also tend to have a bunch of mystery meat navigation because the historic hardware UIs they're emulating were forced to bury stuff behind menus due to limitations of the technology, and cost limitations, at the time. Some are better than others, but the priority is often looking cool in screenshots rather than being comprehensible and discoverable.

I don't mind shadows and shapes that look three dimensional; affordances that indicate what you can do with an interactive element is great and an improvement over the flat trend. But, VST GUIs are among the worst examples to copy. And, round knobs are probably never the right choice for a computer GUI.

Re: Ambient CSS v3 – Blender meets CSS

#14
post #5

I love the concept but (at least on mobile Safari) most of it feels unusable.

The knobs are especially difficult to use (on desktop here). The first two knobs only respond to click & vertical drag - moving up rotates clockwise, moving down rotates ccw. Moving left or right does nothing. The second knob's grab handle is just totally wrong, appearing in only about the 4 o'clock to 6 o'lock position.

Re: Ambient CSS v3 – Blender meets CSS

#16
post #12

God this site has atrocious scrolling behavior. Allowing me to scroll halfway to the next "page" but then forcing me to stop scrolling and start again to get to the next one made me close the page half way through.

When a page about a new GUI thing fucks around with well-defined behaviors, back-button, scrolling, widget interaction, I know I can't trust their judgement. We don't want the same things and it's best if I move on.

Re: Ambient CSS v3 – Blender meets CSS

#17
post #8

I really dislike how the dribbble/envato style somehow escaped containment into Claude and now I’m seeing it everywhere mixed with mediocre design layouts. I think to myself that maybe stuff like this will help counteract that but then I see it in use with 12px typography (the kubernetes 3D dashboard thing) and I recoil in horror. Please consider this a PSA: Claude doesn’t understand UX or good design principles out…

UI greebling [0] is something I'm not looking forward to.

People always miss out the fact that older information-dense UIs were... information dense. We get this weird simulacrum of information density where the LLM has slapped on "every pod has a machine", a made-up PDU for pods with a watt rating somehow, and random status labels EVERYWHERE. All it's missing is the green circle "LIVE" label that every claude app seems to have...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greeble

Re: Ambient CSS v3 – Blender meets CSS

#18
post #14
post #5

I love the concept but (at least on mobile Safari) most of it feels unusable.

The knobs are especially difficult to use (on desktop here). The first two knobs only respond to click & vertical drag - moving up rotates clockwise, moving down rotates ccw. Moving left or right does nothing. The second knob's grab handle is just totally wrong, appearing in only about the 4 o'clock to 6 o'lock position.

Round knobs are just a terrible idea. They never work comfortably with a mouse or touchpad, and are often an accessibility challenge.

Re: Ambient CSS v3 – Blender meets CSS

#19
post #10

Reminds me of VST GUIs, looks great! But, like other commenters have noted, I think a number of these controls might be desktop only, which is totally fine. There’s too much UI stuff centered around mobile anyway these days

Counterpoint: I hate VST GUIs. They're often skeuomorphic hell. They love fiddly round knobs which are terrible to control with a mouse or touchpad, and are bad for accessibility. They also tend to have a bunch of mystery meat navigation because the historic hardware UIs they're emulating were forced to bury stuff behind menus due to limitations of the technology, and cost limitations, at the time. Some are better th…

Haha yeah I think I’m mostly speaking from nostalgia. I do remember wrestling with knobs in Massive or whatever free VSTi back in the day was pretty terrible.

I can’t deny I love the look, though.

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