Years ago I worked at the BBC and while I rarely got to do anything audience-facing, I was allowed to indulge a smol pet-project while building the developer portal.
The website itself is locked behind a staff-only login, but my nonsense is buried within the stock banner photo that anyone can access — try clicking the laptop screen...
this rules
also shoutout to the use of Fibonacci Numbers with Caramel Sauce, one of the example programs in Chef
This is amazing it scrolls it highlights it copies and pastes, it accepts typing!
the only reason this is so fully-featured is that it's literally a browser <textarea> tag, hidden from assistive tech, deformed with a matrix, and blurred with a filter. it's maybe a dozen lines of code altogether (if you don't count the screen contents).
one day i aspire to teach Big Tech about the forgotten art of Just Putting A Text Box In so that we can all go back to being unimpressed by basic usability features, but in the meantime i will give thanks that i've passed the point in my career where i have to toil away in the 400kB JS/CSS3 "perfect text box" library mines where the scrollbars are glitchy and tab doesn't work
anti-software software club? sign me up!
every time i say "webapps aren't real software" and people get pissy about that, my response is "click and drag somewhere in any webshit. whoops, now half of it is highlighted. make that go away. whoops, you can't, you have to restart it. now hold control and mousewheel. whoops now nothing fits in the window, hope you aren't a User who has no idea how they accidentally triggered that. try tabbing between input fields. click on a button and then drag off of it and release because you changed your mind. whoops all of that is broken"
and somehow you can do all this and people go "i don't know it seems fine" and my only response to that is "if your standards and sense of dignity are this low then don't invite me to your wedding because i'm not gonna trust the caterer you consider 'adequate'"
additional: yes, i know your webshit doesn't do this. A) that's only because you put in dozens of hours of extra effort and remain ever-vigilant to prevent it. native toolkits solved these problems 35 years ago and don't regress. B) you aren't making the apps I'm forced to use, and those ones are made by people who don't bother to solve these problems.
still thinking about this because the other day i saw someone, on here i think, saying that webapps include a bunch of intrinsic functionality that you don't get in the dated desktop UI toolkits. and sure, theoretically they do have all that stuff. and it's never useful.
"you can copy any text you like" is an interesting concept for a GUI app. too bad it's completely broken! trying to copy text out of any webshit is an atrocious flickery fuckfest as the browser desperately tries to figure out what you're highlighting in their 150-element-deep DOM stackup, and there's always that 10% risk that you'll end up selecting a stack of elements which turn blue and remain that way until you restart the app
and if it's a goddamn chat app, you're going to get a chunk of useless garbage slipstreamed in along with whatever text you copy, like a timestamp you didn't Fucking ask for and can't get rid of. try your best to copy a password out of a Teams chat without needing to clean it up in Notepad. I'll wait here
and then of course most elements do disable text selection, either deliberately ("that's a button! you'd never want to copy the text off a button, right? smiling emoji) or inadvertently, by overloading fucking onclick routines onto everything. 3/4s of the webshits I have to use at work have fields with information that I need to copy and use elsewhere, info which can't be obtained anywhere else, but when you click on the field it NAVIGATES TO A NEW PAGE.
i will never, not in ten thousand years, concede that a web browser is a reasonable place for an application. yes, native toolkits are dated, I don't dispute that at all, but webapps are not good, they are simply necessary at the moment. i pray to every god that microsoft will casually release an update to winforms one day that makes it Not 30 Years Old and this nightmare will end
MS and Apple have both been trying, for years; I think MS is on their, what, 5th UI framework of the last 10 years now? It's just all their ideas are awful and no one likes them. Swift UI looked promising though, too bad it's stuck on the Mac and locks you into the Mac App Store which is rapidly decaying to nearly as bad as the Windows Store.
Aaaaanyway, another favorite of mine re: web usability vs. native behavior is just: right now, type any key on your keyboard on Twitter (or countless other websites really), and see what horrible surprises you get.
It's literally possible to have a wrong focus in Twitter and end up doing anything from stray RTs to accidentally blocking your friends, and sometimes you might not even realize it's happening! Yay!
And this is a plague everywhere on the web, and the reason is even stupider: fucking Unix nerds.
More specifically: VIM nerds, who insist on slipping VIM keybindings into literally every app they get their hands on, and then once they're there, adding a bunch of extra ones that all just use bare unmodified keys to do god knows what.
Now it's true that Emacsers have been known to do this occasionally, but it's rarely a problem because 1) they'd have to leave Emacs and they never do, and 2) Emacs keybindings are all insane combinations of 12 different keys, so the odds of hitting one accidentally are pretty small.
Not so with VIM, where it's just like ... fucking j.
So I get to suffer the rest of my life with webapps that break in stupid ways because textfield focus on the web is continually broken, and people won't let go of a text editor from the 1970s.
