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Show HN: Hacker XP – Hacker News styled as a Windows XP Outlook email client
Hello HN, sharing my weekend project. I'm a fan of retro GUIs and fan of HN, so I built an alternative HN front end that resembles a Window XP desktop with an old Outlook email client.
Archive and github links if you get 500 errors:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220122190454/https://hackerxp.com/new https://web.archive.org/web/20220122190454/https://hackerxp....
https://github.com/assemblylanguage/hacker-xp https://github.com/assemblylanguage/hacker-xp
- akoster 5y agoI’m excited to try it but getting “ 500 Internal Server Error.” right now. Will check back later- looking forward to it!
- mulmen 5y agoMissed opportunity to style the 500 page as a BSOD.
- assemblylang 5y agohaha yeah that's a good idea, something to add in the future for sure
- curiousfab 5y agoThanks for making this (despite the hiccups and error 500s). I love the aesthetics of that era so much: Efficient usage of screen space, clear borders between different elements - brings back happy memories!
- assemblylang 5y ago>I love the aesthetics of that era so much: Efficient usage of screen space, clear borders between different elements - brings back happy memories! the GUI design of this era was really something else, its hard to describe but the UIs felt so discoverable, the basic core features were presented up front and easy to use, intermediate features could be found in widgets surrounding the core UI, and a whole set of advanced features within the menus once you've mastered your surroundings. It's as if the UIs of the time were designed to create an efficient learning path, at the expense of some information overload when first using the application.
- codeflo 5y agoIn my opinion, UIs back then where created with the expectation that users would learn them. Good designers made learning and discovery easy (bad ones failed, of course), but either way, learning was expected to happen. Nowadays, UIs are designed with the expectation that users don’t learn them. This limits what software can do, but (I don’t mean this cynically) was probably necessary to bring those apps to the majority.
- int_19h 5y agoThe most important thing is that it was consistent. Once you learned about top-level and context menus, you could find basically everything in any app. Toolbars, hotkeys etc would provide shortcuts, but you didn't have to bother with any of that except for the few apps you used a lot. Similarly e.g. lists worked the same everywhere - same scrolling behavior, same ways to select multiple items etc. These days, something as trivial as finding the settings dialog in the app can be a challenge, especially on mobile.
- badsectoracula 5y agoFWIW this is basically how my Thunderbird (91) looks (with a different UI theme of course) and i don't think i've made any special customizations :-P. If anything Thunderbird uses less vertical space due to not having all the big icons. Fortunately Thunderbird (and Firefox) uses Gtk theming for the most part and i've used a Motif-y theme for Gtk3, so it picks up most things.
- Multicomp 5y agoThis is amazing. But I think I somewhat helped the HN hug of death hence getting intermittent 500s. For folks passing through, the image is of a virtual Windows XP desktop complete with Bliss background, taskbar, and Outlook Express showing emails, where each email is an HN link. I may just need to set this as my new HN bookmark!
- Retr0id 5y agoI didn't know it was possible to make an HN post with both text, and an URL. Is this a new feature?
- 4cao 5y agoI think it's always been possible for "Show HN" (and not for "Ask HN").
- sm4rk0 5y agoI just tried filling both fields, but text ended up as a comment (and I can't delete a post): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30040573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30040573
- dang 5y agoYes, as of a few days ago.
- Retr0id 5y agoDoes this apply to all types of post, or just Show HN?
- dang 5y agoCurrently just Show HN. We don't do it for other kinds of posts for reasons explained in the FAQ (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html): Q: How do I make a link in a text submission? A: You can't. This is to prevent people from submitting a link with their comments in a privileged position at the top of the page. If you want to submit a link with comments, just submit it, then add a regular comment. The difference with Show HNs is that when it's the project creator sharing their own work, it's ok for their link and text to be in a privileged position. Hopefully people won't start abusing that, but if they do, we can roll back the change.
- masswerk 5y agoI love the attention to detail regarding a culture of fair discussion. Thank you!
- solmag 5y ago"500 internal error" and audible laughter sorry
- only4here 5y agocurrently getting an internal server error on your website, but I can't blame you for being on the front page!
- btdmaster 5y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20220122190454/https://hackerxp.com/new https://web.archive.org/web/20220122190454/https://hackerxp....
- miles 5y agoHad a brief, glorious glimpse amidst a host of "500 Internal Server Error"s: https://imgur.com/a/y3896NY https://imgur.com/a/y3896NY EDIT: Did not know that links and text could be combined in a single submission, nor that the submission could be edited for so long (the archive.org and github.com links were recently added apparently).
- assemblylang 5y agoWorking on getting the website back up now, got the so called "HN hug of death" from the traffic
- assemblylang 5y agoback up, but expect some 500 errors
- lostgame 5y agoThis is adorable. A little broken on my iPhone 8, but that’s to be expected; it’s meant to emulate a desktop experience.
- nik736 5y agoWhy is the 500 error page not a blue screen.
- jbverschoor 5y agoAhhh.. looks like good old NNTP. Time to get https://www.forteinc.com/agent/ https://www.forteinc.com/agent/ again?
- zozbot234 5y agoNNTP is a fairly clunky protocol by modern standards. It would be nice to get an Agent-style application for 'Fediverse' (ActivityStreams/ActivityPub based) endpoints.
- otagekki 5y agoI keep having 500 errors... Denial of service? As said elsewhere, server errors should look have a BSoD-like appearance ;)
- ZoomZoomZoom 5y agoI just realized I'd be much more surprised and exited to see this as an actual desktop application made with something like Lazarus, than imitation of such a program with web tech. Strange times.
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y agoI hope some picks up the challenge.
- badsectoracula 5y agoYou can get most of the functionality in the page (which isn't much) by setting up Thunderbird (which with the classic layout looks very similar to Outlook Express) as an RSS reader for Hacker News' RSS feed.
- joering2 5y agoThanks, looks cool once I had a chance to load it. Out of curiosity - can I ask you what infrastructure this is running on? Is this some dedicated bare metal or a basic $5 VPS? I am curious as of what it actually takes to give your site a "HN hug of death" once you reach first page. Thanks.
- assemblylang 5y agothat's correct, just your basic VPS running nginx
- qbasic_forever 5y agoUh oh, do we need to be careful of posts going 'viral' again? :) The last time I used Outlook express on Win XP were the glory days of attachment and automatic preview worm emails. Back then we thought sending a bit of jscript or vbscript to an email client should of course be automatically executed and run when received or clicked to preview the contents. shudder
- barelysapient 5y agoDisappointed the 500 error I got wasn't a blue screen of death.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- password4321 5y agoNice re-skin. Suggestions vs. the 500's: · Show the rest of the page if the HN content isn't loadable. The server doesn't seem to have any problem delivering the static assets, which are the majority of the work. Server-side rendering is awesome, but there's got to be a way to not lose the whole layout on server error? · Load the HN content from somewhere else client-side rather than proxying through your server. I don't have experience to share the ideal source, but I do know HN has an official API. Implementing caching may be enough to allow the server to handle it. Congrats on your project getting so much traffic!
- assemblylang 5y agogood points, yes I definitely should have implemented some caching logic, the 500s are due to rate limiting on the HN side I think. Wasn't expecting this much traffic! good lessons for next time and something to consider for future projects
- gred 5y agoThis plus full screen (F11)! chef's kiss
- francoismassot 5y agothank you for this hilarious moment, the internal server error was just too good
- walrus01 5y agothe interface reminds me a little bit of progress quest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_Quest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_Quest
- ThinkBeat 5y agoThis seems like it would be a good candidate for a static site responding to all the requests in an efficient manner. Then have a server process somewhere that generates scheduled updates of the site on a scheduled basis. I would think the site does not have to be real time,
- bitigchi 5y agoReminded me of how Safari for Windows actually had a native Windows UI.
- codeflo 5y agoGenuinely wondering: Are we at the point where people feel nostalgic about early 2000s computing? As someone who was in their mid to late teens at the time, I find nostalgia for Windows XP in particular a bit funny because back then, people couldn’t disable the new UI and activate the “classic look” (Windows NT/9x style) fast enough.
- userbinator 5y agoI think most people liked XP specifically because they could use the classic UI, and in may other areas it was an improvement.
- int_19h 5y agoI'm in the same age cohort, and I am nostalgic about the UI feel of the era (which was basically polished IBM CUA), not the look. As far as the theming goes, you're right - I recall most power users at the time switching back to classic slate grey. But that was purely a visual difference; it behaved exactly the same. Today, I'd be willing to tolerate the ugliness of XP Blue Luna if it meant consistent UX behavior. But this isn't an endorsement of Luna - merely a sign of how far we've fallen.
- ikr678 5y agoI am certainly nostalgic for winamp every time I launch spotify.
- tomjen3 5y agoI am a little bit younger than you, and I do remember XP looking weird to begin with, but there is no doubt for me that the classic design is better and prettier than this modern flat stuff. I know, because I accidentally ran the test on myself when I picked up a test devices at one point and marved at how beautiful the new iOS was, then I realized that I had picked up a super old device that was running iOS 6, which was the last one before the flat era. XP was a huge upgrade over 98, and Win 7 was the last good operating system MS has made. If I could get a security/stability/driver upgrade to Win xp so that it works with modern hardware, I might still have been a Windows user today. Except WSL Microsoft hasn't added any useful features to Windows that I can recall or are excited about since. That said, I don't think you should put too much into the exact version of Windows emulated here - had it been 98, 95 or even Windows for Workgroups it would have been equally awesome.
- ohforsure 5y agoIt's... it's beautiful. Thank you.
- graderjs 5y agoThat is awesome! How cool is that. OMG, that is so cool! :D I want to put my browser in an XP frame to make it look retro.
- bingohbangoh 5y agocute, though I kind of expected this to go a little farther with the theme tbh
- cheeaun 5y agoQuite surprised that you're scraping HN and parse the DOM. Maybe should try use the API? https://github.com/HackerNews/API https://github.com/HackerNews/API