I love it. Screensavers are special to me and I've been building some custom ones for myself this year. Sadly the windows bubbles screensaver this is imitating no longer has its original beauty. Microsoft now fully covers your screen with your accent color before starting the screensaver, so no more desktop image effects work.
There's such a strong nostalgia among so many of us for 90s software, that I can't help but wonder if I should repurpose 90s.dev to be something much bigger than it is, something like a community that wants to recreate and share the wonder and beauty and joy of using computers in the 90s. I already planned on doing some of that with the mini os that I'm developing, with bringing back program skinning for one thing, but I think it needs to become much more official and big-picture, a community.
Keep building and keep sharing. My personal interest in this domain is to build a small screensaver & graphics toys demo pack to share with friends. Trouble is how to share it these days. Asking someone to download a desktop app might be too 90s for most. A browser extension? A website? I would love to help inspire the wanderlust that computers and the internet provide.
What a fun project, thanks for sharing. I've dreamed of projects like this. What did you expect to learn from this project? Did you learn anything unexpected?
I love the spirit here, but the limitations on iOS are not the limitations of the medium. Mobile computing has lots of interesting and inspiring limitations, we don't need apple to draw artificial squircles we can't cross in an api.
20 years is a generation, however for many of us, Apple's walled garden was a refreshing concept versus the mobile operators gardens.
First of all, getting SDKs was akin to console devkits, back in 2004 getting a Symbian SDK was still a commercial only product for example, same for Windows CE/Pocket PC,...
Followed by about 80% tax, only to be listed on mobile phones magazines, with the SMS code to trigger the application download.
Hence why everyone rushed for the garden, it was indeed easier to be creative in Apple land.
If youtube is to be believed, thumbnails make a dramatic difference to first-glance engagement. A model trained to find great(by what metrics?) screenshots from the film sounds like a fun project.
I'm looking forward to classic movies with AI-generated thumbnails that take the main actor or actress and make them do the "Youtube Thumbnail Surprised Face". Imagine The Maltese Falcon or Citizen Kane but with thumbnails that look like [1].
That'd take a human with taste a terrifyingly large 5 minutes, whereas AI trash can be entirely programmatic, with maybe an intern picking the best of 4 in a couple seconds. Think of the savings, and with only a moderate impact on the reputation of your service.
Good point. I wonder if Amazon is experimenting with this with the idea that they will be able to make more "eye grabbing" thumbnails with genAI as opposed to pure stills from the given film. The click through rate may be a key metric internally, and since prime video is an add-on to prime the risk of customers dropping the service over this is low (compared to if Netflix did this)
That would require paying a contractor for ~5 minutes of time to skip through the movie until they find a good scene, take the screenshot, trim it, and upload it. Ugh. We've already got all these GPUs over in AWS, just spin up an image generation model and prompt it "Make a thumbnail preview image for the film {{film.name}}", good enough.
What percentage of people will notice the primary means of marketing the film?
Almost all of them, surely. Maybe not consciously... but unconsciously certainly.
Films are incredibly expensive products to produce, an average of $100 million dollars apparently [1]. Do the incentives really not align to pay for professional artists to create a high quality thumbnail? I doubt it. Hell, youtubers have figured out it's worth doing this on every video which cost and pull in 4-5 orders of magnitude less money.
