Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

81–90 of 364 posts

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

#81

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_...

I'm surprised no one has created a VAAS Volume as a Service

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

#82

This is a bit of an odd answer, even in a question that expects odd answers. That is because it sounds so normal, yet I have Googled for it and almost no one advocates for it. They do maybe advocate for it in terms of design, but I mean in making actual static websites. Enter Google Slides: the product for your uncle Joe and aunt Lysa to create their own websites without knowing how to code! I even have an example we…

Wow, this idea brings me back to one of the moments that first inspired me to start down the path of web development. In 2007 I took a semester off and got a job as a teaching assistant for a special education classroom and was 1:1 with a child that LOVED computers but would get overwhelmed by the information density of your typical website - too many decisions would frustrate him.

One week, we were learning about farms which I was really excited for because his love for the computer was matched only by his obsession with animals. Sadly, his outbursts would require me to separate him from the group time where we would show them pictures of animals and learn about their sounds, functions, etc. This made me think of creating and interactive PowerPoint where I made a slide with options for “petting zoo”, “animals with jobs”, “wild cats”, etc. each choice would lead to a new slide with a set of photos, icons that played their sounds, and even tried creating a set of quizzes where I recorded an animal sound and he had to select a photo that matched.

I worked until 3 AM making this PowerPoint and was deliriously tired the next day, but man the joy this kid experienced while he got to play on the computer AND learn about animals without getting worked up over a multitude of decisions sparked something in me that made me decide I wanted to do something with IT.

Your idea really hit home for me and helped me remember one of the reasons I do what I do today - frontend and app development. Lowering boundaries and making technological concepts more accessible can inspire unexpected interest and adoption.

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

#86

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,…

This would be a good story for r/MaliciousCompliance!

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

#87

I think the weirdest way is using React. I mean, it feels so unnatural for me, compared to the jQuery way. You have to download thousands of packages, keep track of various dependencies and their security holes, adding an overhead for auditing them. HTML5 with jQuery IMHO still beats everything in simplicity and getting work done fastly

Maintaining state by writing directly to the DOM is pretty fundamentally "weird" too, if you think about it.

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

#88
Back in the days of Flash the web was full of interesting and weird UIs with tons of art and animation.

ie -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-2sKZjawq4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHbQmqmmIFk

Now its just the same boring Bootstrap/Material design cookie cutter crap everywhere.

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

#89

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_...

I'm surprised no one has created a VAAS Volume as a Service

PulseAudio is network-enabled, so...

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

#90

Not sure if this counts as weird or novel web UI, but I wrote a small library to stream Dear ImGui's vertex and index buffers to browsers via websockets, and just render them using WebGL's drawElements [0]. There a couple of examples linked in the README for anyone interested. [0] https://github.com/ggerganov/imgui-ws

Nice!
Post reply on HN