Readit NewsThere was a time, though, long ago…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsanity
…the brief era of “Haxies”. There was an application called ShapeShifter that allowed for Mac OS X theming.
That epoch is long gone, and I can barely even find screenshots. But it existed.
1. Permissions/auth for prototypes. Stakeholders go for that. MBA folks don’t want to be sent crazy random obfuscated URLs, they want a nice login page that makes them feel secure. (Because MBA types will get weird about corporate secrets, even just high-level wireframes.)
2. Figma/Miro-esque infinite canvas with comments. Product managers and stakeholders love that flow.
There is a lot of weirdness lurking in the default user agent stylesheet…especially in Safari: https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2021/things-i-learned-reading-w...
Browser vendors put a lot of surprising, and very poorly documented, defaults into user agent stylesheets, and they can trip you up at the most basic level, and the styling is poorly exposed in most web inspector tooling.
I ran into a nasty one with Safari’s date picker—had to go down a lot of rabbit holes to figure out I needed to finesse the `::-webkit-date-and-time-value` CSS to get an input field styled correctly.
But for our B2B site…I can’t name names…one of our investors did refer us to a well-established design agency who does small and medium-scale enterprise branding and marketing. And they did great work. So yes, there are a few ringer VC design agencies out there.
But this sent me down a memory rabbit hole…a former manager of mine loved Brackets. Brackets was Adobe’s open-source text editor (https://opensource.adobe.com/brackets.io/?lang=en) that was sorta VSCode, but prettier.
Adobe sunsetted that project, but it still apparently somewhat lives on, in the form of Phoenix Code. (https://phcode.dev) And it still does look very “designed” in comparison to VSCode. I really like the default typography, tag highlighting, and some of the details of the text editor itself.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/WebKit_Exte...
Just this morning, I had to go down the WebKit pseudo-element rabbit hole to fix a layout bug in a very standard date-of-birth field.
Mind you, I am coming on board from a very particular station: I am a UX designer and developer, and bouncing between Figma and our HTML/CSS/Templ template stack back and forth all day. So I am writing markup more so than code.
And after a few days of using Cursor, I’m very into it. Partly because the default color scheme and layout just feels better than any theme I’ve used in VSCode. But more so, I really like their approach to the actual UI design of the autocompletes and access to AI features. They’re making a lot of smart choices that make it easier to understand what the autocomplete is actually completing, and exposing contextual keyboard shortcuts to access more features.
It also seems to be better at picking up my UI patterns than VSCode. Maybe. I need to get some more time with it, but it really seems to pick up the typographic and spacing rhythms and patterns I’m building.
A lot of it is monkey-see-monkey-do. And realted, the widespread use of common frameworks instead of people actually understanding how web sites work and doing their own programming.
I build a web site for a hospital that was fast and responsive and accessible. A manager complained that it didn't look like a "real" web site because the pages loaded instantly. She wanted me to put in a mechanism so that every time someone clicked on a link a loading spinner would appear for a few seconds before the next page loaded. Because that's what "real" web sites do.
Maybe she was responding to how jarring page transitions can be. I’ve gotten some good use out of the View Transitions API in a product I’m building. (https://developer.chrome.com/docs/web-platform/view-transiti...) It’s a server-side rendered multi-page app, and throwing in just a bit of view transition CSS to get a nice fade effect when you go to a different page does feel nice.
This isn’t really a new debate. This is kinda the “it looks tacky to record a feature film at a high frame rate, Peter Jackson”. We have a cultural visual vernacular that guides how we expect certain media to look, and it just feels weird to have a movie from the last century remastered so that it looks like it was shot on the latest digital camera.
I inherited farm land from my grandfather. I am very much not a farmer, I do not want to live in Southern Illinois, but I don’t want to give up the land, so I rent the land to a farmer with adjacent property.
I realize that’s not really the point of this article—this is more about huge firms buying up non-trivial amounts of land.