Opened the comments and immediately cmd-f for “sheep”, so pleased other people remember it. I remember being given it by a friend at school on a floppy disk…
I can't believe these actually used to be popular but they were. I wonder if their over-the-top nature made learning how to use a computer mouse a little more fun.
For security reasons that's outside the scope of the core protocol. But don't worry, all it would take is for someone to develop an eye-following protocol and for the compositors to implement it.
And like Solitaire's "it's a tool to teach mouse use", I always thought the "it's a utility to track the mouse, not just a bit of whimsy" was a bit of retconing, but I have no real proof.
Ghost was possible on the desktop as well, IIRC. I wonder if it was intended as an accessibility feature or for new users who had trouble keeping track of the mouse.
Yup. I am glad we've moved on, at least on windows, to double-tapping left ctrl to highlight the cursor. It's a pleasant effect.
macOS's shake-the-mouse gesture isn't as nice. It's such a "violent" gesture that it feels like it will just reinforce the feeling of frustration for users.
Note that left ctrl trick is still just a PowerToy in Windows. That's one I'm surprised hasn't graduated to in box given its general usefulness for accessibility and overall simplicity.
Exploring mouse options for something else and stumbled upon a reminder there is an in box feature for it. It's off-by-default and the changes that Power Tool makes are: switch from single Left Ctrl to double Left Ctrl, and switches from classic Windows "wave of rings" visual (it expands a bunch of rings out from the pointer as a very simple animation) to the "Spotlight" mechanic that dims the screen except for a circle around the pointer.
macOS's is discoverable by the very action one might take trying to find the cursor even without knowing about it, while Windows' isn't. Source: I found the macOS one by accident, but didn't know about the Windows double-tap-ctrl thing until reading your post. Most likely I'll forget the ctrl trick by tomorrow, but shake-the-mouse was stuck in my brain the instant I found it.
I don't really like the idea of double-tapping control either, for much the same reason, but wiggling the mouse seems gentler. I still use trails, though; I'll take all the help I can get.
I used to wonder the same then one day I tried LSD[0], and it was another illumination. By then, I'm sure the origin of the cursor trail was some trippy programmer trying to recreate the same effect he saw "under the influence".
A different form of cursor ghosting would occur when certain GUI programs got stuck. So it might just be that somebody saw that and thought it was neat.
Trails were an accessibility feature in early GUI environments (based on accident of early GUI renderers; even Windows 3.1 used to make trails "naturally" on an over-taxed machine when repaints were taking too long), but I think most of the uses of them, especially in the early days of the web a lot of it was just "personality". That OG Geocities feel of finding a bunch of interesting JS snippets, copy and pasting, and maybe lightly tweaking the ones that spoke to you and seem like the coolest thing to add to your fan page for your current favorite cartoon or local roller coaster.
Not to mention that early laptops had LCDs with very slow refresh rates, which could make a moving pointer very difficult to track. The trail gave an indication of where the pointer had been and was going as it was traveling.
Yes, but it got removed from overt Accessibility Features at some point Vista-ish and is hidden as an "additional option" that's three or four clicks away from "Ease of Access".
I always use trails, along with the largest pointer I can set and inverted coloration. It makes it a lot easier for me to always find the mouse at a glance when I move it slightly. I didn't always do so in the past, but the move to 4k clinched it.
Windows has a bug(?) with inverted colors combined with trails, though, where sometimes the cursor double-inverts when it's at rest. I consider this sort of a feature, though, since I don't care where it is if I'm not actively using it.
My fan site for the TI-86 graphing calculator (first draft done as part of 5th grade Computer Class, revised to get extra credit in my algebra class a few years later) used it! I had no idea what Javascript even was, but I knew how to view source and knew that if I pasted in all the magic between <script> tags from my computer teacher's website I'd get the cursor effect. He (or the original dev…) had very well-annotated code that included a bunch of variables you could customize.
I remember this from the era when building websites with FrontPage and DreamWeaver was still a thing. There were sites with catalogs of those "apply cool effects to your website by copy-paste this snippet to your HTML source file", and a clock following the mouse cursor is definitely one of them! Fun times.
I had a GeoCities page and really wanted to try the cursor effects/followers, but they never seemed to work. I kept trying to add them and never saw anything... until I looked at the site on a friend's computer in IE and the screen just exploded with cursor followers. I was primarily a Netscape/Firefox user and didn't consider that my browser might not support the effects!
I don't recall ever seeing it in the wild, but I remember it as a JS script you could add to your site from a page that I think was http://www.dynamicdrive.com/
I may have played around with it on a couple of HTML pages written in Notepad way back.
I particularly like the ESM examples in the README of this project for feeling like an interesting modern take for how some of the old 90s JS libraries used to feel. Many of the 90s libraries often weren't distributed as JS files to add to a SCRIPT SRC but as SCRIPT blocks to copy and paste with big comments denoting things you might want to tweak, giving more of that feel of "ownership" of the JS and that "everything is tweakable", not just JS lives on remote CDNs and is imported all or nothing and nowhere near as tweakable. ESM feels like it starts to bring some of that back and head towards a best of both worlds: composable pieces imported from remote URLs and tweakable script blocks to copy, paste, and then make your own.
I'm probably biased from my position of already knowing ESM well at this point having pushed a lot of my own modern tech stacks towards it, but I'd like to imagine 90s teen me would have found ESM blocks exciting.
My parents were so mad at me when I installed Comet Cursor on the family computer.
I was 9 years old, and I think I had grabbed it from a shady site that had modified it to stuff it with additional adware and malware...the computer went really slow after I installed it, but I had a totally badass cursor that looked like it was being electrocuted, so overall I think it was a fair trade.
As the above points out, that "shady site" was possibly just the official Comet Cursor website. They themselves were an adware company and a weird, direct bridge from 90s "whimsy" web to modern ad tracking and adware.
"the computer went really slow after I installed it"
This version also appears to be using a lot of system resources. Firefox on Linux is idling at about 6% CPU while reading HN. Go to that web site and the usage goes up to 80% to 90%. Come back here and CPU goes back down to 6% or so.
Interesting, but no repro on macOS/Safari. macOS/Firefox, however, will take up about 50% between the "Firefox" process and a "Firefox isolated web content" process.
This was back in an era when your Windows computer started to feel slow (which inevitably started to happen after a few years) was to take the standard recommendation and reinstall the entire OS.
It's so far from the world of an advanced Linux SysOp.
Just to note: CPU percentage isn't that useful these days. CPUs can throttle back their clock speed quite far, so you'll often get numbers that are meaningless that way.
Your conclusion is fairly like to be correct though.
I recall Cursor Mania which was a similar idea. It bundled Smiley Central which was a necessity to out-smiley your contacts on MSN messenger. It also prefigured emojis. And it almost certainly came with a generous helping of malware.
One of the founders of Comet was a friend of a friend. We chatted about it a bit. They really seemed like earnest folks who stumbled on a way to monetize virality in the early days of the internet. There was absolutely no framework for ethics of data collection and even they seemed kinda shocked at how easy it was to do back then. I think once the money was flowing in, it was too hard to stop.
Malware like this used to be so common; software that did something useful and then on the side also installed some horrible user-hostile thing. Adware and search hijackers, too. Fortunately that's mostly ended on desktop but it's a constant battle on mobile devices still.
I used to enjoy trying to delete malware (mostly porn advertising) off lab computers in college. There were a couple I could just never get rid of and I checked all over. They were buried deep and had roots throughout the system lol.
> The company was criticized for secretly tracking users who installed the software, each of whom was given a unique serial number
Doesn't seem too out of the line nowadays, does it? Even Microsoft recommended users uninstall the program. Wouldn't it be wonderful if they had kept their distance from such practices?
Nowadays Microsoft lets malware writers run roughshod on their platforms with impunity. (See: the unbanning of the node-ipc supply chain mass-file-deletion virus author)
I remember Comet Cursor using drive-by install techniques, back when browser security basically didn't exist, so you would find it installed after visiting certain websites, and there was at least one example of advert iframes setting off the background install.
IIRC dilbert.com was an example of a significant site that did this (I stopped visiting for that reason, or something very similar if it wasn't Comet Cursor) either directly or through an advert it carried.
Fashion trends are currently rebelling against the understated 2010s by bringing the late 90s/early 2000s aesthetic back in the form of wider fits and louder colors. Makes me wonder if/when we might see a similar change in web design, or even furniture. I might be biased as a younger person without many memories from that era, but I'm all for some change (barring impacts to accessibility) if it breaks up the monotony of the corporate-lite graphic design trends of the mid 2010s.
I've been building a virtual replica of my 1996 gateway 2000 in an 86Box VM. I am amazed at how good the Windows 95 UI feels. I also want to get screensavers and system sounds going on my Linux workstation.
At this point I don't even care what it looks like. Flat can work just as well as not flat as long as it's consistent.
A stop sign is the definition of flat: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f9/ST... but it has a border which separates it from the rest of the world. If it were a button when you've clicked it once you will know where it is and how big it is.
Random text with no differentiation from the rest of the page is a big reason why I've lost the habit of clicking hyperlinks. If it doesn't look like it will do something I will assume it does nothing.
It's funny, real buttons on devices that look and feel like buttons are on the retreat with almost everything using touch controls nowadays. So the flat and featureless buttons of modern GUIs increasingly reflect the UIs of the physical world.
re: 90's / 200's design style in websites ... check out neocities. there's a recent surge in people creating personal sites with exactly that aesthetic / nostalgia in mind.
People's nostalgia for the 90s is really because it was the so-called "end of history" era, where the USSR fell and the US had no real enemies and everything seemed to be looking better. Then 9/11 happened and you had the Iraq war and then 2008. It's only in retrospect after that time that people think "hey, the 90s were actually pretty idyllic and peaceful." Hindsight is 20/20, etc etc.
As for why zoomers are now into the 90s, I think there is some picked up nostalgia from millennials around the 90s by osmosis, kind of like how there was some nostalgia for the 70s in the early 00s, limited as it was for millennials, which I think was about the time the boomers first had their midlife crisis (fits somewhat for now I think).
Don't people feel nostalgic for the ~30 years ago in every decade? In the early '00s we were into the '70s, not the '90s. And the '80s were the decade that everyone tacitly agreed never happened, right up until a few years ago when they started making a comeback.
I think it's just because that's how long it takes between the invention of a trend or style, and the majority of people not remembering a time when that was 'the new awful thing that the youth of today are doing'.
It you haven’t seen it, take a look at a movie called “Midnight in Paris.” It does a great job highlighting how each generation find the past to be somehow better than current.
If folding phones take off (still too expensive for most), I could see wider web designs coming back, closer to desktop.
One huge problem with responsive design, especially mobile-first design, is that it largely killed the creativity of the old desktop web. Nobody is going to spend time developing 2 unique designs for 2 form factors. Everybody will go with the easiest option of RWD which is to stack elements on top of each other in the most boring layout possible.
I'm embarrassed to have only realized the correct form very recently (after some resistance in a code review). More specifically, I've always made entities plural by using an apostrophe (e.g., "This field holds a list of SomeCoolObject's."). I think my train of thought was that it differentiates (better?) when the entity name happens to end with an 's'.
There are standard typographical conventions I don't always adhere to in the context of talking about code or other technical subjects. For example, the American standard is for punctuation that comes at the end of a quotation should be inside the closing quotation mark, "like this." I sometimes do the reverse, or even put a space before a period or comma, just to avoid possible confusion about what's actually part of the quotation and what's not.
The apostrophe in the way you're using it here is something similar: you're accentuating that the actual name of the thing you're talking about is SomeCoolObject. Sometimes that kind of thing could matter (particularly think of when pluralizing a word changes its spelling beyond simply adding an "s" to the end). You might be better off just restructuring a sentence to avoid having to pluralize at all: "a list with members of type SomeCoolObject" or somesuch.
This is known as the greengrocer's apostrophe. Most sources will say it's wrong, but it's quite common if you look for it. I think it's fine, particularly when talking about code when the actual name of the symbol matters.
To be truly nostalgic they would have to take longer to load, and slow down my whole computer. If I trusted the page enough to enable javascript, which was so rare to begin with in the 90s. Heck, I rarely enabled images until at least 2000 when I got a cable modem.
That said, this is fun and impressive. I wouldn't even know where to start with something like this, I just bookmarked with the intention of reading through the code later but I probably never will.
My only criticism would be that the code uses `element.appendChild(canvas);` - if the element already contains child elements then the generated canvas is going to go over them, blocking any user interaction associated with them - for example, links. I think `element.prepend(canvas)` would give a better UX?
Is there a way for HTML+CSS to capture what the user's cursor actually looks like, in case if a website wants to perfect the "ghost" effect without replacing the cursor image?
No, there isn't a way to capture this under normal circumstances. The best a site can do is to detect the client's platform and use an image of the default cursor for it to try to get close
One thing I loved about the internet back when these types of effects were popular was how collaborative and innovative web design was. People would see something they liked on someone else's website and just add it to their own. It might be an animated gif, a cursor effect, a background image, or a site's entire layout. Everything was fair game.
You'd see something cool on one site and suddenly it'd be all over the place and then it'd eventually get edited until it became something new that got spread around again.
Even though everyone was shamelessly copying everyone else the effect was that websites were very diverse yet familiar. Then people started using social media where they didn't even have to learn to copy/paste HTML and everything slowly became very bland and generic.
hard to conclude there is a lot less creativity being shared today on social media, than the haphazard, disparate websites in the 90s. I remember pages full of glitter, and hardly readable nor user-friendly marquee text with blue underlines in technicolor with no synchrony on how to navigate them
The content now is just as creative as it ever was, it's just now all displayed in one of a few of social media's uniform sanitized templates.
While there were plenty of sites back in the day that were basically unreadable all kinds of popular layouts and color schemes rose to the top and gained popularity. I wonder how things would have evolved if it had continued.
No, but the same thing was achievable with GIFs under the "DHTML" banner (the "D" meaning "Dynamic", which typically just meant "JavaScript and CSS"). Custom cursor effects were really popular demos
Here are some pages from that era that show off some of these:
Emoji as the term is currently used did not, but graphical emotion/tone indicators did under a different name: emoticons. They were usually small gif files, sometimes animated but usually not, manually referenced with img tags in your own designs rather than simply being available in commonly installed fonts (so insertable as text if you know the right unicode code/sequence) as we find today. Some forums / BBSs would automatically translate text-based smilies to relevant emoticons or provide their own syntax to add them such as [smiley-face].
Emoticons descended from the text versions referred to as smilies (https://www.csh.rit.edu/~kenny/misc/smiley.html). The two terms did often get confused (or just deliberately used interchangeably).
I miss Classic Mac OS extensions which added whimsical things like this.
As I remember there were a few cursor trail extensions, as well as an extension that added physics to dragged icons (you could even throw them!), an extension that turned all on-screen text upside-down, etc. Not the least bit useful but fun.
The Classic Mac OS extension model was a security and stability disaster but it was unparalleled in terms of how it let third party devs tweak the OS. Even modern Linux desktops can't compare.
Very early OS X versions had a fairly simple way to revert the GUI back to a NeXT or Win look. Reason being, OS X was Openstep, which was NeXT, and part of Openstep was integration with NT at the time, hence the GUI toolkit.
Neither of the non-OS X interfaces were very functional at all. I always wondered why those throwaway parts will still lying around.
This brings me back to my childhood and building web pages when JavaScript elements to add whimsy and whatnot to the page.
Was it particularly attractive? No. Was there much function (except for a few screen types and maybe cursor styles, not really). Was it fun and did it make the internet feel exciting and like a truly new and unique medium? Hell yes.
Love seeing this stuff preserved.
And add me to the list of people that now misses skeuomorphism from the aughts and the Delicious Generation of Mac apps. Lickable icons and interfaces. I still love them, mostly because it reminds me of when software had personality.
That’s the thing about the late-90s to early 2000s web aesthetic: it had personality.
I love stark and clean Swiss-influenced designs as much any anyone else. But software, websites, and hardware was always best when it had personality.
I would sometimes not get apps that didn't have good enough skeuomorphised icons. Like, if you're a flashlight app that can't even convince me you're a flashlight app then pfft begone.
Entirely valid. In a world where our phones have a hundred apps on them, the clarity of its icon is a truly important feature, especially for infrequently used utility apps.
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[ 191 ms ] story [ 3193 ms ] threadhttp://www.daidouji.com/oneko/
https://samperson.itch.io/desktop-goose
It really is better, folks. Daniel Stone talk!
And like Solitaire's "it's a tool to teach mouse use", I always thought the "it's a utility to track the mouse, not just a bit of whimsy" was a bit of retconing, but I have no real proof.
macOS's shake-the-mouse gesture isn't as nice. It's such a "violent" gesture that it feels like it will just reinforce the feeling of frustration for users.
[0]: I swear, just once!
I’m pretty sure the option still exists on Windows 11
Windows has a bug(?) with inverted colors combined with trails, though, where sometimes the cursor double-inverts when it's at rest. I consider this sort of a feature, though, since I don't care where it is if I'm not actively using it.
I may have played around with it on a couple of HTML pages written in Notepad way back.
I'm probably biased from my position of already knowing ESM well at this point having pushed a lot of my own modern tech stacks towards it, but I'd like to imagine 90s teen me would have found ESM blocks exciting.
sigh, then along came Comet Cursor to remind us why we can't have nice things:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Cursor
The "can't have nice things" part comes from the tracking that came along with it. Comet Cursor was a pioneer of what would become the modern web!
I was 9 years old, and I think I had grabbed it from a shady site that had modified it to stuff it with additional adware and malware...the computer went really slow after I installed it, but I had a totally badass cursor that looked like it was being electrocuted, so overall I think it was a fair trade.
This version also appears to be using a lot of system resources. Firefox on Linux is idling at about 6% CPU while reading HN. Go to that web site and the usage goes up to 80% to 90%. Come back here and CPU goes back down to 6% or so.
Your conclusion is fairly like to be correct though.
Glory days, nonetheless.
that phrase managed to bring the 9 years old mindset back in my mind. That was awesome, thanks a lot.
the beginning of the presently ongoing shitshow of tracking and privacy violations to earn revenue.
I desperately want a Bonzi Buddy plushie, however. Just for the lolz.
...you mean, it's now built into the OS and even harder to remove.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29415031
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28449607
Doesn't seem too out of the line nowadays, does it? Even Microsoft recommended users uninstall the program. Wouldn't it be wonderful if they had kept their distance from such practices?
IIRC dilbert.com was an example of a significant site that did this (I stopped visiting for that reason, or something very similar if it wasn't Comet Cursor) either directly or through an advert it carried.
I'm just glad my college clothes will be back in style again, right as my daughter gets old enough to care what her dad is wearing.
A stop sign is the definition of flat: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f9/ST... but it has a border which separates it from the rest of the world. If it were a button when you've clicked it once you will know where it is and how big it is.
Random text with no differentiation from the rest of the page is a big reason why I've lost the habit of clicking hyperlinks. If it doesn't look like it will do something I will assume it does nothing.
As for why zoomers are now into the 90s, I think there is some picked up nostalgia from millennials around the 90s by osmosis, kind of like how there was some nostalgia for the 70s in the early 00s, limited as it was for millennials, which I think was about the time the boomers first had their midlife crisis (fits somewhat for now I think).
I think it's just because that's how long it takes between the invention of a trend or style, and the majority of people not remembering a time when that was 'the new awful thing that the youth of today are doing'.
One huge problem with responsive design, especially mobile-first design, is that it largely killed the creativity of the old desktop web. Nobody is going to spend time developing 2 unique designs for 2 form factors. Everybody will go with the easiest option of RWD which is to stack elements on top of each other in the most boring layout possible.
The apostrophe in the way you're using it here is something similar: you're accentuating that the actual name of the thing you're talking about is SomeCoolObject. Sometimes that kind of thing could matter (particularly think of when pluralizing a word changes its spelling beyond simply adding an "s" to the end). You might be better off just restructuring a sentence to avoid having to pluralize at all: "a list with members of type SomeCoolObject" or somesuch.
That said, this is fun and impressive. I wouldn't even know where to start with something like this, I just bookmarked with the intention of reading through the code later but I probably never will.
My only criticism would be that the code uses `element.appendChild(canvas);` - if the element already contains child elements then the generated canvas is going to go over them, blocking any user interaction associated with them - for example, links. I think `element.prepend(canvas)` would give a better UX?
You'd see something cool on one site and suddenly it'd be all over the place and then it'd eventually get edited until it became something new that got spread around again.
Even though everyone was shamelessly copying everyone else the effect was that websites were very diverse yet familiar. Then people started using social media where they didn't even have to learn to copy/paste HTML and everything slowly became very bland and generic.
While there were plenty of sites back in the day that were basically unreadable all kinds of popular layouts and color schemes rose to the top and gained popularity. I wonder how things would have evolved if it had continued.
Here are some pages from that era that show off some of these:
http://www.javascriptkit.com/script/script2/simpleimagetrail...
http://www.javascriptkit.com/script/script2/simpleimagetrail...
http://www.mf2fm.com/rv/dhtmlbubblecursor.php
http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex11/customcursor.htm
https://gaim.pidgin.im/ChangeLog
So while we didn't have modern emoji in the 90s, the seeds were there. At least in Japan.
Emoticons descended from the text versions referred to as smilies (https://www.csh.rit.edu/~kenny/misc/smiley.html). The two terms did often get confused (or just deliberately used interchangeably).
As I remember there were a few cursor trail extensions, as well as an extension that added physics to dragged icons (you could even throw them!), an extension that turned all on-screen text upside-down, etc. Not the least bit useful but fun.
The Classic Mac OS extension model was a security and stability disaster but it was unparalleled in terms of how it let third party devs tweak the OS. Even modern Linux desktops can't compare.
See also: Those little widgets like XEyes that always look toward the cursor's current coordinates.
I remember this, what a joy! http://www.wildbits.com/gravite/
Neither of the non-OS X interfaces were very functional at all. I always wondered why those throwaway parts will still lying around.
Was it particularly attractive? No. Was there much function (except for a few screen types and maybe cursor styles, not really). Was it fun and did it make the internet feel exciting and like a truly new and unique medium? Hell yes.
Love seeing this stuff preserved.
And add me to the list of people that now misses skeuomorphism from the aughts and the Delicious Generation of Mac apps. Lickable icons and interfaces. I still love them, mostly because it reminds me of when software had personality.
That’s the thing about the late-90s to early 2000s web aesthetic: it had personality.
I love stark and clean Swiss-influenced designs as much any anyone else. But software, websites, and hardware was always best when it had personality.
For example I think iOS is a big trendsetter and it’s less flat and boring than a few years ago (however still too white and boring).