Specifically: Where’s my Bacon number?

I was catching up on the latest coder porn, i. e. the excellent tech write-up for Bacon of Hope by platon42 and gigabates. What a treat! I haven’t even finished it yet, but it already gave me two ideas:

• Oooh, so that’s how you draw fancy anti-aliased lines on the Amiga!
• Mmmmh, bacon… wait, don’t I have a Bacon number?

I remember looking it up decades ago (well, one decade at least), but the Oracle of Bacon doesn’t find it anymore. Last time I checked, I thought I had one, by means of:

• My IMDb entry for Die PARTEI (playing myself) *
• Helge Schneider starring in it, too
• Some early other film where Helge Schneider co-starred with a later German Hollywood star
• Some big-ass Hollywood movie with that actor and Kevin Bacon himself

I had a good laugh when I found out why I couldn’t find myself anymore. (Hmm, is that “ego-baconing”, like ego-googling?) The “Die PARTEI” movie is categorized as a documentary now! Hehehe. Well, where do you want to draw the line? With documentaries re-enabled, I got my number:

There’s even more than one path: The one I remembered was with Helge Schneider and Udo Kier in Mutters Maske, and then Armageddon and Apollo 13, giving me a number of 4. Former German chancellor Angela Merkel and former US president George W. Bush link me to the Bacon in three steps only, but that’s a lame documentary-only path. :)

Well, enough with the bacon vanity. More Amiga coding!

As I was browsing Tonsky’s blog for yesterday’s post, I noticed the pretty mouse pointers. Are those new? Better yet: When you click, they change their shapes! That’s something I’ve only seen in games so far. How fun!

Two questions:

• Wouldn’t this be cool to have in your operation system? Or is this already a thing? In some application maybe?
• How is this done in HTML and CSS? I only know about the cursor property in CSS, is there a cursor-pressed property as well?

Okay, that was more than two questions. As for the implementation, it’s an :active pseudo-selector applied to some usually-not-clickable elements, including the page body. Cool, I didn’t know you could do that!

body        { cursor:url('pointer1.png'); }
body:active { cursor:url('pointer2.png'); }

See it in action: Click around in the area below, or try it on a separate page. (Sorry, mobile or tablet users: This only works with a mouse or trackball…)

Good thing I made the perfect test picture for that in 1998! :)

Modern GUIs are often not great. Back in the days™, it was mostly pre-installed crapware and printer utilities that used idiosyncratic controls and their very own colors and window decorations because, well, just because. Somewhere along the road, common buttons, checkboxes, title bars, and window controls went out of fashion, and when everything became a web-app or was styled like one, things took a turn for the (even) worse. Nowadays, you cannot even tell if a window is active by looking at its title bar, let alone drag or resize it easily.

Yes, this is…

• the rambling of a grumpy nerd,
• a platitude,
• covered in tons of opionated articles already*,
• and true. :)

Recently, I especially enjoyed reading this post about the downfall of native GUIs and these thoughts on the shortcomings of “invisible” design.

I’m currently working on a long-overdue Coppenheimer update – the last one was nearly two years ago, and its recent popularity gave me a little nudge. As I’m not a wasm, emscripten, or C++ guy, progress is slow (i. e. getting it to compile again after the vAmigaWeb merge and making sure everything still works), but I’ve got to the point where I’m thinking about new features. That’s where these blog posts struck a nerve: One thing I certainly won’t change are the GUI elements!

Originally I chose AmigaOS 2/3-inspired buttons for some authentic retro feeling, and because I wanted to try out the border-image CSS feature (I love what modern browsers can do out-of-the-box with plain HTML and CSS).

But looking back at it now, having oldschool buttons and checkboxes with classic fake-3D borders makes for a nice user experience as well. As in: The interface communicates clearly what is clickable and where, you don’t need to hover with your mouse pointer over possible controls, guess the meaning of minimalist icons, or guess-click (I hope). It was also a huge help when making the GUI: I just crammed in all the buttons I needed and balanced them a little with spacing and alignment – done! It’s a mess and not very logical, but you quickly find your way around if you try.

Or maybe I just like the look, and it amuses me how its approachability is a breath of fresh air in 2026? Although it’s 35 years old now?

Probably that, yes. :)

PS: I did notice one thing I might change: I applied the “disabled” state inconsistenly – with the authentic ghosting pattern for checkboxes, and an opacity change for the pause/step buttons. Tsk, tsk…

Edit: *) Some of my favorites:

• Benjamin Button Reviews macOS
• It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons
• Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination
• The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe
• In Loving Memory of Square Checkbox
• The Decline of Usability: Revisited
• And don’t forget to visit (play?) User Inyerface for a good laugh.
• Oooh, and I just found this gem: Grumpy Website