I think it's worth noting that 2004-2006 was a time period where a Flash applet could have done this on the client. This was also a time when Flash content was supported by Apple QuickTime, so it's interesting that they didn't make use of it here.
I wonder if a SWF was ever hosted on the apple.com domain.
> This was also a time when Flash content was supported by Apple QuickTime
While QuickTime supported some Flash content, my recollection is that it only supported simple animations which could be mapped onto QuickTime's own interactive video features. I don't think it supported ActionScript, so this kind of interactivity would have been beyond it.
Flash => HTML5 was a travesty for creative little games on the web. It never recovered. Even today the authoring tools are crap for the average person with an idea, if you ignore AI vibe coding for a minute, which overcomes the tooling deficiency by being experts at the difficult tooling. (But I guess Flash => HTML5 was only a part of it, the rise of IAP everything, which was also pioneered/popularized by Apple, may have played an equal or larger role in the demise of that game genre.)
I agree the authoring tools were excellent. I think it goes beyond Flash though.
I have this book from 2008 on Flash web designs and they're so cool, there's so much detail and love put into them. Then they all became flat and soulless.
Same with skeumorphism. I bought yesterday two iPhone 4's, one with the original iOS and one that had been "upgraded" to the flat laggy version with all the detail, all the love, all the joy sucked out of it.
The exact same thing happened across the entire digital landscape, more or less simultaneously.
It's taken Javascript ten years or more to get to the point Flash was at, and the tooling is still nowhere near as good. Open standard is not the only thing that makes the web happier, and it's not even the main thing. Playing Flash games on Newgrounds in 2005 was amazing, and arguably 2025 has it worse.
I've used GIMP every day for 20 years and I'll still gladly say it's a piece of crap compared to Photoshop. I don't think that's exactly a niche position on my part ;)
In light of WebGPU, I respectfully disagree. Because it has us building shader modules, buffers, and pipelines up-front with descriptors, the task of figuring out why something isn't working is often front-loaded. Pair that with its eloquent warnings (in comparison to, like, gl.getProgramParameter(shader, gl. COMPILE_STATUS) ) and the ability to label all your stuff to see it referred to by name in aforementioned warnings text... I'm rambling, but, there's just a lot of helpful stuff in WebGPU that I don't think OpenGL has, that stands to really help newcomers along
I don't have an answer, I'm just wondering out loud.
Cone cell activation is complicated. Displays with three well chosen primaries are economical and effective, but they aren't intended to produce every perceivable color. And our chromaticity diagrams, that pointy splotch that's often used to compare display gamuts, is based on a "standard observer" that is a simplified model for human perception.
An ideal pixel would be able to emit any kind of electromagnetic radiation of any intensity, kind of fun to think about but unrealistic and impractical.
What additional primaries mathematically do is expand a gamut from a triangle to a convex polygon. While ten or a hundred primaries would be bonkers, I bet we could fit a quadrilateral or a pentagon to the perceivable gamut in ways that'd see some gains.
I'm impressed by your sprite pipeline and gibs animations. Your attention to detail and navigation of constraints have really paid off, I can't wait to play this sometime
> If Meta is liable for when someone underage uses their service, then Meta is going to require proof of age—
Let's be clear what this means, "Meta is going to require" something. They'll require it to continue to do something, which is namely to be a bad company, running bad services, without pivoting to something else.
Of course, no one requires Meta to continue to be Meta. We'd protect people by requiring companies like Meta to request PII outright, because then the user is explicitly prompted to decide whether using Meta's services is worth surrendering their privacy. And if consumer sentiment and market forces mean anything anymore, that will incentivize Meta to replace their bad services with better ones, ones that don't cause them tricky liability issues.
In other words, forcing operating systems to demand PII from users from the get-go, regardless of the quality of that signal, and to broadcast that to any website, is not, as you put it, "the way to do it with the least impact on privacy and anonymity possible", etc etc. The "way to do it" is to phase out this rotten era of surveillance apparatus disguised as social media companies.
Sorry for being irate, it just feels like so many people these days arrive too quickly (for my taste) at conclusions without testing certain popular assumptions about the inevitability of tech oligarchy.
Y'all have got to check out the color palette widget wizardry of David Aerne. Seriously, the guy's prolific. The first link is similar to OP's, an image color palette extractor:
“Texture healing works by finding each pair of adjacent characters where one wants more space, and one has too much. Narrow characters are swapped for ones that cede some of their whitespace, and wider characters are swapped for ones that extend to the very edge of their box. This swapping is powered by an OpenType feature called “contextual alternates,” which is widely supported by both operating systems and browser engines.
Contextual alternates are normally used for certain scripts, like Arabic, where the shape of each glyph depends on the surrounding glyphs. And they are also used for cursive handwriting fonts where the stroke of the “pen” might have different connection points across letters. Texture healing is a novel application of this technology to code.”
Always able to do it? Yes. Even before OpenType alternates, the extended ligature support in TeX 3.x would have also allowed for this sort of thing.
Why has no one tried it before? Because (a) nobody thought of it and (2) OpenType alternates, while they’ve been around for a while, have not always been supported in the sorts of programs that use monospace fonts (code editors and terminals)
Over time I must have spent several dozen hours looking into fonts, but I somehow always end up sticking to Menlo which looks just right to me.
But this one looks really good ! I will give it a spin, thanks for sharing.
Fonts are software. You can program them such that any two letters beside another can render uniquely. This is most common with ligatures like (e.g. fi -> fi) but also, say, swapping a colon from baseline oriented to centered if between 2 numbers, and so on.
>Has no one tried this before?
This is a great execution of a very common font practice.
It really only makes sense on high-DPI displays (or large font sizes), which didn’t used to be that wide-spread.
Conversely, nobody seems to be doing pixel-based hinting anymore, which is why all newer fonts tend to look terrible at small font sizes on lower-DPI displays.
I wonder if a SWF was ever hosted on the apple.com domain.
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