Don't even look at the effects, don't think about how it looks, it's irrelevant.
No, it's not. On the contrary, it's not only relevant, it's the central issue. Otherwise he wouldn't have made the site look like that.
I find your complaints - without these snippets and rationale - annoying and missing the point.
The site is awfully slow to scroll on my machine. I can't use the keyboard to scroll it, either. Right clicking on one of those icon thingies behaves the same as left clicking, which surprised the heck out of me. So did the fact that you can scroll the site by dragging the background, with left or right click; you can imagine what that did for my mouse gestures.
If you think I have to present snippets of code to validate these complaints, then you're the one missing the point.
Just in case: the point is that while the site is behaves like a nifty tablet app, it breaks both the widespread expectations of how to interact with a web site and several significant interaction mechanisms that a lot of people rely on. To distill the point even further, it would be a pretty nice mobile app, but as a site it's about as nice as using blink and marquee tags was back in the day.
> No, it's not. On the contrary, it's not only relevant, it's the central issue.
Ok, I'm sorry, I presented my point of view and shouldn't have expected others to think the same.
As for me, I'm not exactly touched by visuals. My ideal UI and UX is CLI and this has not changed for over twenty years now. Anything more than this is an annoyance for me and I would probably consider much of really good designs as ugly overkill. Probably, because I have no way to say which design is good and which is not, I lack the skill to care.
However, I'm a programmer. I'm easily excited by what someone coded, especially if this something reaches the limits of technology. I am a kind of guy that's going to be amazed with a simple, bug ridden, slow and visually ugly proof-of-concept, just because it's cleverly coded.
I didn't had the time to read through the source yet. I don't know if it's enough to make me smile. Maybe it's not, maybe it is. And that's the point: I'm a programmer. Not a business person. I don't care about a product. I don't care about UX. I'm in love with code, and that's why I still work as a programmer, am not burnt out and not going to go into management.
If Bret was product-centric he'd use Flash to do this. It would be faster, both in development and execution times. It would be cross-platform, at least as much as Flash itself is. It would be prettier and much more usable. It would take fraction of work that went into coding this in JavaScript.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding him, but the fact that he did this in JavaScript suggests, for me, that he didn't treat it as a "product", that needs to be "shipped". I think he took a journey into unknown, beyond the limits of current JavaScript technology, and documented this journey in the form of code. That's why I'm going to read his notes, his code, and learn from him. Because I'm a programmer, because what I care about is code.
You are entitled to be primarily concerned with how usable the site is. When I said that you're missing the point, I thought that maybe - maybe - Bret didn't even think about usability of this particular site, maybe he wanted to show programmers that coding something like this is possible. Maybe I'm wrong, this is pure speculation - Bret himself should say what he intended.
I'm not that different from you. I also love coding and I love cleverness in coding. However, I also care about "product".
That doesn't mean I expect everything to be a "product". If you tell me, "Hey, look at this clever concept/technique/trick/idea/spike/prototype that I cobbled together", I'm not going to tell you "Damn, why is it so ugly/slow/buggy" (unless the idea was specifically to be pretty/fast/bug-free).
You and I basically disagree about the assumed purpose of Bret's site. If his site were a game, then I would be the dude who's disappointed because it's Quake III and not Dragon Age ;)
PS: Caring about "product" and UX doesn't mean you'll get burned out or go into management ;) I know you weren't generalizing, but talking about your specific case instead, but I just wanted to mention that caring about code and caring about users are things that don't work against each other.
> You and I basically disagree about the assumed purpose of Bret's site.
Fair enough :) I think we should wait for Bret's comment on this, only he will be able to tell us what he really intended to achieve with his site.
> Caring about "product" and UX doesn't mean you'll get burned out or go into management ;) I know you weren't generalizing,
I wasn't generalizing, but I certainly was exaggerating... a bit. Sure I like my code to be used, and that it feels nice to have users that are happy to work with something I created. It's just that my focus is primarily in code and I feel a bit frustrated here, because it seems like I'm in minority. There are many people here commenting on cool, clever, technical hacks, but I feel that there is more of those who only `itertools.cycle(["product", "business value", "product", "customers", "product", "shipping", "product"])`... I don't think it's wrong, just that I don't feel that way and would like to be recognized as someone of value (not necessarily business value) too :)
Don't even look at the effects, don't think about how it looks, it's irrelevant.
No, it's not. On the contrary, it's not only relevant, it's the central issue. Otherwise he wouldn't have made the site look like that.
I find your complaints - without these snippets and rationale - annoying and missing the point.
The site is awfully slow to scroll on my machine. I can't use the keyboard to scroll it, either. Right clicking on one of those icon thingies behaves the same as left clicking, which surprised the heck out of me. So did the fact that you can scroll the site by dragging the background, with left or right click; you can imagine what that did for my mouse gestures.
If you think I have to present snippets of code to validate these complaints, then you're the one missing the point.
Just in case: the point is that while the site is behaves like a nifty tablet app, it breaks both the widespread expectations of how to interact with a web site and several significant interaction mechanisms that a lot of people rely on. To distill the point even further, it would be a pretty nice mobile app, but as a site it's about as nice as using blink and marquee tags was back in the day.