the most irritating website has been found
I found this searching for information on how to program for the old Commodore Amiga’s HAM (Hold And Modify) video mode and you gotta touch and feel this one to sneer at it, cause I haven’t seen a website this aggressively shitty since Flash died. the content isn’t even worth quoting as it’s just LLM-generated bullshit meant to SEO this shit site into the top result for an existing term (which worked), but just clicking around and scrolling on this site will expose you to an incredible density of laggy, broken full screen animations that take way too long to complete and block reading content until they’re done, alongside a long list of other good design sense violations (find your favorites!)
bonus sneer arguably I’m finally taking up Amiga programming as an escape from all this AI bullshit. well fuck me I guess cause here’s one of the vultures in the retrocomputing space selling an enshittified (and very ugly) version of AmigaOS with a ChatGPT app and an AI art generator, cause not even operating on a 30 year old computer will spare me this bullshit:
like fuck man, all I want to do is trick a video chipset from 1985 into making pretty colors. am I seriously gonna have to barge screaming into another German demoscene IRC channel?
https://www.agile451.com/insights/hold-and-modify-fine-tuning-aiOpen linkView original on awful.systems
Here's some meandering thinking on this...
I use an iOS app called Toot! and it does something special that helped me realise a distinction from sites like this.
The Toot app has all this weird stuff in there, none of which gets in the way, none of which serves any purpose, it's just weird. For example if you click on the action menu in a user profile it has an option "scan user" which plays a cheesy robot-view style scan animation over the page. Or if you unfollow someone, their avatar animates out of the bottom of the screen like a ghostly soul leaving the body.
Anyway, in UX design there is always talk about things like "micro animations" like elastic movement of scrollable items, subtle parallaxing, etc incorporated into the ui interactions. They talk about "conversational ui" where all of the text is conversational - "oh no, there are no results for your search!..." kinda bullshit. The idea being that you are brightening up a user's day, bringing delight, and all that shit. This all ignores the hard truth that craigslist still works fine. But that's beside the point.
The distinction, I think, between these two things is warmth and coldness. Toot! is a capable but otherwise standard masto client, it's actually a bit confusing to navigate in some places - but it's got that thing where you can tell it's a small team who have fun making it - the effect is a bit like contagious laughter. On the other hand you have the UX designed, orderly implementations of fun that don't give you any indication that the thing was made by people. That's where the coldness comes from and I don't think that even registers as a factor among the people who talk about "human-centeredness" in design. Not just that you're designing for people, because why the fuck do you need to be reminded of that, but that the person(s) making something should leave some imprint of their work in that thing.
This is similar in philosophy to the physical products that show signs of use over time. Instead of putting the imprint of the makers in the mass-produced thing, they let the thing collect the imprints of the owner/user so they see themselves in it. Like early macbook pros with thin aluminium shells rather than the modern solid unibody, they collected dents over time.
I don't buy into the trope of IKEA furniture having this effect because you "build it yourself" btw. That's marketing bullshit that ignores the fact that IKEA sells because it's cheap as fuck and you can furnish a room with one trip in your hatchback. Big item garbage pick-up days should be called IKEA garbage pick-up day.
so yeah. This site is an example of coldness via simulated warmth.
these are very good points
for some reason I can’t stop thinking about a web app I use daily that randomly plays a confetti animation when I interact normally with it, then pops a notification that reads “you just saw an animation! we’ll play these from time to time.” and it displays that notification every time there’s an animation with no way to turn either one off, and I can’t remember why but either the animation or the notification is implemented so poorly it actively interferes with my workflow for a few seconds
the phrase "corporate mandated fun" popped into my head as I watched this site, and I think it ties in with what you said here
re-reading this after coffee - need to avoid writing opinions so early in the morning
I know almost nothing about web design, but I feel confident in saying whomever put that bouncing menu button on the side should be fired
you know more about web design than these web designers
A few select snarks:
check out their main page, cause it gets so much worse
also did you notice that on load every page does a fake loading-style animation regardless of whether or not everything is already in cache? they somehow ported Flash’s loading jank into CSS and I fucking love it. this is the kind of talent we need to reskin awful.systems
did you see the home page? It loads a splash animation of their shitty logo before revealing the content. Immersive!
I only just noticed this is the website for a digital agency. It makes a bit more sense in that context. It's not right, but it's the kind of stuff that suits sell to suits who think people love their product so much that they want a scrollytelling* experience to learn more about it
*I learned this word last week and I love it so much - chef's kiss coporate marketing delusion
I remember when the 2000's pages did this, and all in flash. There used to be an HR Giger inspired one where the inferface also made noises. "Time to click a link" Link squelches
If there ever was a purpose for Flash on the web...
p.s. your "Link squelches" makes me want to watch eXistenZ
the shift from the hamburger menu is because the scrollbar disappears. They could easily fix this by making the
:root {width: 100dvw}which makes it 100% dynamic width - meaning it ignores browser elements like scrollbars.but the site is drupal so there's a good chance this is a modified theme
I don’t want it fixed. It’s perfect as is
It's a UK company, so it looks as if the cast from "Attachments" has returned to the biz after a whole lotta E.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachments_(TV_series)
I need to torrent this.
You really don't.
http://www.ntk.net/attachments/
Edit that just seems to be standard early 2000s NTK branded snark, not so much Attachments.
God, I miss NTK.
Oh I have to watch it now. A terrible early-2000s era British theatrical interpretation of a startup in the dot com boom? Apparently criticised for excessive sexual content!
This is the poor man's World's Worst Website Ever.
Oh my word I need to check this out on my desktop tomorrow, it's already so bad on mobile it's like somebody managed to modernize every bad 90s web fad.
the experience between mobile and desktop was remarkably consistent for me. somehow the bad ideas port over perfectly, they’re just larger
On desktop you do see the weird mouse effects. Which remind me of the sticky keys windows thing.
The site is also written by AI I think (the 8 vital strategies for online security has several tips which have little to do with online security ('have secure backups!' it is also the blandest of bland content).
@self
I’ve never witnessed such passion for the Web Designer’s Art.
Whats the appeal of Amigas? I really regret being too young to appreciate things like it and BeOS.
it definitely varies based on the person but roughly:
this concludes the prepared Amiga rant you have fallen victim to
youtube must’ve heard me cause this compilation of Amiga demos from the Revision 2023 demoparty a few months ago was in my recommendations (flashing lights warning for those unfamiliar — this is basically the live visuals and music for a very nerdy type of rave). I timed it to skip the first demo, Blood Sugar Rising, cause I felt like it wasn’t as impressive as the rest. note the lower right corner of the screen when each demo starts — OCS demos run on the Amiga’s original 1985 chipset, and AGA demos target the 1992 revision of that hardware. traditionally, demos usually target unaccelerated Amigas, so they’ll usually run on machines with ordinary CPUs and mild RAM upgrades
when you watch these, note how many impossible things seem to be happening: none of these effects are built into the Amiga, it definitely shouldn’t be able to support complex 3D, and it should have a very constrained color palette to work with; these and many other visual effects in these demos are enabled by tricks the demoscene has mastered. even the audio shouldn’t be possible — the amiga’s audio hardware was considered to be too primitive to play back samples at high fidelity or handle complex effects
a lot of the tricks the demoscene discovered have made their way back into Amiga development — there are now AmigaOS apps that use the 1985 chipset to do previously impossible things like better-than-VHS video playback and MP3 playback while multitasking
I was just opening pouet to pull up this year's revision entries
if you look at the specs of it, it's absolutely astounding what sceners produce on the amiga
edit: this made me think of something, so I posted about it
fuck yeah! an OCS Amiga runs on a ~7MHz 68k CPU (the basic one with no cache or FPU), usually 512k of RAM (modern demos and games often grab a luxurious full 1MB cause a lot of Amigas had that RAM upgrade back then) and a single 880k floppy drive with no other permanent storage. but all the rest of the chips in the system run as concurrently as possible, in a way that feels like having a primitive GPU but with a lot more control over what its individual components do