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Berkeley Systems “After Dark” screensavers recreated in CSS

bryanbraun.com

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Re: Berkeley Systems “After Dark” screensavers recreated in CSS

#131

Post by yreg »

cwizou wrote: post #55
yreg wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a 2017 5K iMac and don't use screensaver. Just a few weeks ago I noticed that the Dock and menu bar is very slightly burned in.

Yep, there are two different 5K panels on iMacs, off the top of my head LG and Samsung, and the LG one does have slight transient burn in. It's not "true" burn-in (like CRTs or OLED) as it goes away after a bit but it's fairly easy to trigger with the current trend of very white/light grey designs in macOS, the easiest way to notice it is move from a whitish area to a mid grey one (Daring Fireball is a great example…

Bingo, Daring Fireball on fullscreen shows my burn-in in the full glory.

Re: Berkeley Systems “After Dark” screensavers recreated in CSS

#132

Post by r00fus »

fredley wrote: post #58
joezydeco wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oooh now let's talk about PointCast. Who remembers when the future of the Internet was push ? https://www.wired.com/1997/03/ff-push/

Man I miss the enthusiasm and optimism of the 90's

No, I knew that "push" was BS. The concept and the promise of the Internet as a whole was exciting but most of the startup scene (especially in the frothy late 90s) was pure land-grab easy-money types.

Re: Berkeley Systems “After Dark” screensavers recreated in CSS

#133

Post by sunshineforever »

nsxwolf wrote: post #89
donatj wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In high school in the very early 2000s my friends and I thought it was hilarious to add bluescreen slides to our PowerPoint presentations. Most of the computers ran Windows 98 and it was a common sight, we’d get gasps in class. It was dumb harmless fun.

My favorite trick was to take a screenshot of the desktop, hide all the icons and the task bar, then set the screenshot as the wallpaper. It gets even the most advanced users every time.

This is the one I used to do

Re: Berkeley Systems “After Dark” screensavers recreated in CSS

#134

Post by thangalin »

https://uxfactor.ca/1151/

I know one of the authors of Flying Toasters and sent him the link. Here's what he had to say:

"It's a rough approximation, which is super cool, but misses all of the nuance.

"You see, back in the day, there were very strong competitors to After Dark that had as much or more animations. The thing that set After Dark was a "je ne sais quoi" that felt like an elevated experience. Both the customers & the competitors thought this was some sort of accident, or that the animations were important, but neither of these things was true.

"The secret was that people loved the nuance of interacting with the product (& subtlety in the animations) and it was very carefully designed with cognitive science. I pushed the team very hard before I would let anything be released because I insisted on the nuance."

Re: Berkeley Systems “After Dark” screensavers recreated in CSS

#136

Post by brundolf »

rasz wrote: post #75

On one hand super cool due to tricks employed, on the other CSS animations tend to be very power hungry https://www.bryanbraun.com/after-dark-css/all/rainstorm.html takes Some time ago I noticed an older 3GHz i5 laptop, otherwise perfectly usable, would start to struggle decoding h264 webcam stream because webmaster decided to use CSS animation for a scrolling title bar superimposed over video feed.

I'd assume CSS animations would be much more efficient than JS-based animations because they can be entirely comprehended and executed by native code

I wonder if there's some unnecessary reflow going on here? (reflow forces animations to happen on the CPU instead of the GPU)

Re: Berkeley Systems “After Dark” screensavers recreated in CSS

#137

Post by geoduck14 »

nsxwolf wrote: post #89
donatj wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In high school in the very early 2000s my friends and I thought it was hilarious to add bluescreen slides to our PowerPoint presentations. Most of the computers ran Windows 98 and it was a common sight, we’d get gasps in class. It was dumb harmless fun.

My favorite trick was to take a screenshot of the desktop, hide all the icons and the task bar, then set the screenshot as the wallpaper. It gets even the most advanced users every time.

I did this to a girl at school. It ended up moving all of her singer, and iTunes found them "again", so half of her songs would show an error "can't find this file", because it was pointing to the old location.

It was the prank that kept on giving.

Re: Berkeley Systems “After Dark” screensavers recreated in CSS

#139

Post by zxcvbn4038 »

myself248 wrote: post #122
zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #46

My favorites were the "Totally Twisted" screen savers from Berkeley Systems - particularly the "Voyer" screen saver where you saw the silhouettes of all the people in their apartments doing crazy things at night. https://shorturl.at/fDGTW

I liked the daredevil, trying to jump schoolbuses and stuff with his motorbike. Once in a blue moon, he'd be driving a schoolbus trying to jump other stuff. What's funny is that these screensavers were _expensive_, and thus people pirated them. I remember the most active warez BBS in area had a whole file section dedicated to screensavers.

One of the reasons I turned to open source is that I did pay for most the After Dark series and they all disappeared when Seirra? bought them out and shelved the company. That really killed any interest in commercial software for me.

Re: Berkeley Systems “After Dark” screensavers recreated in CSS

#140

Post by dublin »

joezydeco wrote: post #56
fredley wrote: post #3

Beautiful. The nostalgia hit me very hard with this. I remember in the original version you had all sorts of options, and could even combine screensavers. For people who may not remember: screensavers used to be a neccessity as old CRT tubes would 'burn in' an image if they held it static for too long - leaving a shadow of the static image permanently. Screensavers kicked in after a few minutes and displayed somethin…

Oooh now let's talk about PointCast. Who remembers when the future of the Internet was push ? https://www.wired.com/1997/03/ff-push/

I ran software for Dell's portables during the height of PointCast craziness - they eventually banned it because aboutq 2/3 (IIRC) of the company's bandwidth for the Product Group offices was being consumed by PointCast news updates and animations!
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