Animations in gemini

I found this capsule off of #discogem. I was surprised because the loading of the page had an animation on every page. so of course I dug a bit. The owner of the capsule created their own server called Atlas and it enables this through streaming. I've seen this before with a chat program but never for animations.

Figured I'd share and see what folks thought. cool or distracting?

her.st/

Posted in: s/discoveries

🍀 gritty

2023-07-11 · 10 months ago · 👍 skyjake, StanStani, Ruby_Witch, norayr, mintu, kleb

7 Comments ↓

🍄 Ruby_Witch · 2023-07-11 at 11:03:

I think it's pretty neat! Definitely provides a terminal-like experience. I do wonder if this effect would populate extremely slowly on much older machines. I know that some people like to use gemini for retro computing purposes.

I don't know if I'd want *every* page to be like this, but it's not objectionable. :)

🐦 angryboyd · 2023-07-11 at 11:40:

Interesting. Imagine if you could mirror or host an actual animation on gemini, like ASCII star wars or something

Also, the capsule owner seems like somebody who causes a lot of holiday mealtime arguments...and not in a good way

🕹️ skyjake [mod...] · 2023-07-11 at 11:51:

From a client-side point of view, this is actually a bit of a waste of resources. Every time new data arrives (a few characters at a time), the client needs to redo the page layout. In Lagrange, for example, this is not a trivial operation and can have relatively high CPU usage.

Sending as much as possible in one go, as fast as the TCP stream is able to handle, generally avoids both network transport and client-side overheads.

(Of course, Lagrange could be further optimized for partial page layout updates...)

😎 Smokey · 2023-07-11 at 13:51:

Its a neat little bit of flavor but as skyjake says its cost is non-trivial.

🚀 jsreed5 · 2023-07-11 at 15:25:

This feature is only usable to some clients and not others. In my own case, I use Deedum on Android and Kristall on desktop, neither of which support streaming. The result is that I only see a static page that loads slowly. Of course I'm in the minority opinion that streaming should not be allowed in the Gemini protocol to begin with, but that's a different discussion.

🚀 stack · 2023-07-11 at 17:30:

This is a horrible thing to do, both to the server and the client!

And yet I have to admit it is kind of fun.

☕️ mozz · 2023-07-11 at 19:13:

Here's another example, this capsule uses streaming to simulate slower baud rates for ansi art scrolling.

— ansi.hrtk.in/