alt Hacker NewsReminds me of VST GUIs, looks great! But, like other commenters have noted, I think a number of these controls might be desktop only, which is totally fine. There’s too much UI stuff centered around mobile anyway these days
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QuantumNomad_ • yesterday at 7:55 PM
> Reminds me of VST GUIs
I was thinking the same thing. And I was also thinking, now that Ableton Live has a JavaScript toolkit [1], maybe this Ambient CSS could be useful in that context.
I’m still on Ableton Live 11 so the Ableton Live Extensions SDK is not available for me. Therefore I cannot try this idea myself yet.
[1]: https://www.ableton.com/en/blog/introducing-extensions-sdk/
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Counterpoint: I hate VST GUIs. They're often skeuomorphic hell.
They love fiddly round knobs which are terrible to control with a mouse or touchpad, and are bad for accessibility. They also tend to have a bunch of mystery meat navigation because the historic hardware UIs they're emulating were forced to bury stuff behind menus due to limitations of the technology, and cost limitations, at the time. Some are better than others, but the priority is often looking cool in screenshots rather than being comprehensible and discoverable.
I don't mind shadows and shapes that look three dimensional; affordances that indicate what you can do with an interactive element is great and an improvement over the flat trend. But, VST GUIs are among the worst examples to copy. And, round knobs are probably never the right choice for a computer GUI.