Steven Wittens

Steve Wittens also does a lot of these kinds of articles (math with WebGL-infused illustrations, etc.) at https://acko.net/ One of my favorites: https://acko.net/blog/how-to-fold-a-julia-fractal/. This helped me understand the relationship between trigonometric functions and complex numbers like nothing else I've ever seen.

Best tech-blog I have found so far: https://acko.net/ (3D graphics, webdev, tech-philosophy, (and not mine!)). If you know tech-blogs of comparable quality, I am eager to hear from you.

The front page of this website has a 3d demo'ish interactive ui. Love it. https://acko.net/ Great article.

https://acko.net It's a personal website, but is full of amazing visualizations, educational content, and it basically has a demo scene demo to music on the front page, all hand coded in WebGL. It's just cool, in a delightful, personal, artistic way, and I love it.

I've only seen on the author's website [0], but the explainables there are some of the best I've seen. [1,2] [0] https://acko.net [1] https://acko.net/blog/how-to-fold-a-julia-fractal/ [2] https://acko.net/blog/to-infinity-and-beyond/

Hi Michele! Cool to see you here. You have an amazing website. Very cool stuff, with a good eye for the detail. Maybe the first concurrency to http://acko.net/ which I have seen in years. Keep up!

If you want to name a "software artist", I would say Steven Wittens best fit the description https://acko.net/

Probably one of the most unique designs for a personal blog I have ever seen (the animated page headers, page transitions, and a lot of genuinely great articles and talks): https://acko.net

Ah, my old Intel HD 2000 is on Chrome's hardware render blacklist (for good reason, disabling it is hilarious). WebGL is amazing though, I agree; http://acko.net/ is how all websites should work. :D There are also well-polished JS games like http://zty.pe/ (that don't require WebGL); that game in particular is built on a nonfree JS game engine, but it's a good demo of what's possible with efficient coding.

In addition to the recommendation by lastofus, I highly highly recommend this presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNO_CYUjMK8 Despite the title, the talk is NOT WebGL specific. It's a fantastic, FANTASTIC tour of 3D graphics fundamentals. This is, IMHO, quite simply the best presentation I've ever seen on how matrix math relates to graphics programming. Also see Stevens' site: http://acko.net Side note - There are some great pages there, be sure to check this one out if you're at all interested in how math is applied to animation: http://acko.net/blog/animate-your-way-to-glory/

If you haven't seen his website front page, it's well worth a look too: http://acko.net/ I think it's been on HN before, It was the first WebGL site I've seen that just worked.

I like http://www.syedrezaali.com/output/ Nice showcase for his work, which is excellent as well. http://acko.net/ Make sure to open some articles, especially the one on the website header (that's not an image). http://jwz.org/ One of the bastions of the older internet, started in 1993. Design of the main site is pretty polarizing.

OT, but the root site (http://acko.net/) has some great web animation work

> But it's hypocrisy in hindsight given that all the great features that web developers flocked to came from the other engines. And now Mozilla is complaining that there are -webkit prefixes everywhere. ? It isn't Mozilla saying this. It's every browser but WebKit. It's Microsoft, Mozilla and Opera, and non-browser people too. The mobile web is broken because it's full of WebKit-specific stuff that other browsers can't render. That's a fact. Mobile version of IE, Firefox and Opera can't render the mobile web properly because of that, even though they are standards-compliant browsers. > As for 3D CSS, it's not just about 'disagreements' or 'the spec'. The work Apple has done on iOS and desktop has made WebKit2 a seriously impressive engine. I made this site recently: http://acko.net/. It's butter smooth in Safari, choppy and ugly as hell in Firefox 10 (if I enable the 3D effect there). And yet Mozilla goes around proclaiming Firefox now supports CSS 3D and is on par with WebKit. Link? All I've seen is that Firefox was announced to support 3D CSS stuff, which it does. There might be bugs where it doesn't render as fast as it should, you might want to file one about your website (which is cool, btw). Side note: WebKit2 is a new embedding API for WebKit that is multiprocess-enabled, not a new version of WebKit. Chrome, for example, doesn't use WebKit2 - Chrome has its own multiprocess code. The 3D CSS stuff is in WebKit, and not related to the WebKit2 API (which, btw, has…

According to Wikipedia, SVG fonts were 3 out of a 100 tests. If you ignore those, Firefox 4 passed ACID3 about 2 years after Opera and WebKit, and that's only counting the actual released versions rather than nighties. But it's not even about the specific tests, it's about the crappy and holier than thou attitude that Mozilla demonstrated in those years, with very little to back it up. For example this post, which has been removed by the author but is still referenced elsewhere: http://blog.mozilla.com/rob-sayre/2008/03/26/acid3-is-basically-worthl… The gist of it was that ACID3 didn't test things that were relevant to 'real' web developers. Which is a dubious criticism at best, seeing as ACID3 was an excellent weathervane for sorting the wheat from the chaff. But it's hypocrisy in hindsight given that all the great features that web developers flocked to came from the other engines. And now Mozilla is complaining that there are -webkit prefixes everywhere. As for 3D CSS, it's not just about 'disagreements' or 'the spec'. The work Apple has done on iOS and desktop has made WebKit2 a seriously impressive engine. I made this site recently: http://acko.net/. It's butter smooth in Safari, choppy and ugly as hell in Firefox 10 (if I enable the 3D effect there). And yet Mozilla goes around proclaiming Firefox now supports CSS 3D and is on par with WebKit.

Me and another fellow both cited Steve Wittens' review of HTML+dom at each other at the same time a couple days ago. It's a lovely document. https://acko.net/blog/html-is-dead-long-live-html/ At the end he talks about html-in-canvas. This was a while ago, but I think the limitation is still there: the input mapping is totally fudged, just really bad DIY mapping. It only really works for fairly trivial uses. Steve also mentioned a task I'd like to see: project html onto a curved surface. I'm so so so happy we're getting something. But it feels like there are many many many constrains here, that might not be so apparent at first glance. It would be so nice to really have HTML in space, but this isn't really there.

I think you are mistaken. I remember landing upon that website some time before 2023 and being greatly impressed by that very 3D parallax effect. To my knowledge there were no AI tools available in 2022 capable of producing effects like that. There are barely now. To my understanding it was made possible by another project of the same author [0] - check the date. Also check this [1] - dated 2003. Is it so hard to accept that humans are more capable of doing intricate and impressive work than any LLM will ever be? - [0] https://github.com/unconed/CSS3D.js - [1] https://acko.net/blog/avs/

have you seen this? is a great explanation why complex numbers are "numbers that like to turn" https://acko.net/blog/how-to-fold-a-julia-fractal/

This is a good design pattern, but be wary of doing validation too early. The design pattern allows you to do it as early or late as you like, but doesn't tell you when to do it. Often it's best to do it as part of parsing/validating some larger object. See Steven Witten's "I is for Intent" [1] for some ideas about the use of unvalidated data in a UI context. [1] https://acko.net/blog/i-is-for-intent/

My favourite animated blog header of all time is that of acko.net: https://acko.net/blog/zero-to-sixty-in-one-second/ The design language is (understandably) feeling a bit 2013 these days, but objectively I think it's held up great. It's something I'd like to do for my blog, since I'm getting tired of looking at the same static header, but I've yet to come up with the perfect design.

It's somewhat silly to read about animation using a static doc. My preferred intro to quaternions in the context of motion is the pair of articles at https://acko.net/tag/quaternions/. They were critical helping me learn quaternions for computer graphics. I also recommend https://acko.net/blog/how-to-fold-a-julia-fractal/ as a primer if you aren't comfortable with regular complex numbers.

Cool, Steven Wittens is behind this. The header at https://acko.net/ is one of the first examples of WebGL I remember seeing in the wild, and still one of the cleanest. Looking forward to seeing where this goes!

Steven made the Whacko AVS packs for Winamp back in the day under the name UnConeD, which were easily the most impressive visualizations I ever saw in AVS. He has them all for download on the website[1]. You could always see the source code, and I remember as a teenager trying to pick them apart to see how they worked. It seemed so much more advanced than what everyone else was doing. Other packs would have pretty waveforms. Whacko AVS had, as just one example, a spaceship flying through hyperspace in a storm - and it still reacted to the music! Justin Frankel, the creator of AVS (and Winamp itself), now makes Reaper, one of the world's best DAWs. [1] https://acko.net/blog/avs/

Not everything this fancy is wasm. Obvious example: https://acko.net/

As well as screensavers, the visualizer in winamp was a great time sink for me with effects like [1] which bears a striking resemblance to the acko intro. Not much surprise then that they were made by the same person [2] 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bhm7uFv4ZOQ 2. https://acko.net/blog/avs

I think this article skips over many nuances of the declarative model. For a real "ground up" approach of explaining those I'd recommend this article series: https://acko.net/blog/climbing-mt-effect/

https://acko.net/ is a personal site I've always found to be impressive and memorable (not mine).

This is based on Mathbox which is... brilliant. Here's the demo blog post that shows off what it can do: https://acko.net/blog/mathbox2/

Ciao. Thanks for the appreciation. I know well http://acko.net/, is very very beautiful one, and also for me is the number one! I still working on my site and it's very distant from acko... but thanks again ;)

yeah, 2013: http://acko.net/blog/zero-to-sixty-in-one-second/ just absolutely blew my mind as well this talk by the same author is also great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zkx1aKv2z8o