[HN Gopher] SQLook - A free online SQLite database manager with ...
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SQLook - A free online SQLite database manager with a Windows 2000
interface
Author : gringow
Score : 165 points
Date : 2025-01-25 23:47 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sqlook.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (sqlook.com)
| josephcsible wrote:
| I'd be nervous about giving access to any nonpublic data to a
| closed-source app that only works while online.
| mahoro wrote:
| I enabled "Offline mode", and it worked. But yes.
| smitty1e wrote:
| The Clippy resurrection seemed gratuitous.
| yuppiepuppie wrote:
| Just out of curiosity, does any one find these sorts of retro gui
| appealing in saas-y type software?
|
| I personally am turned off by it.
|
| Unless of course I'm missing the point and it's supposed to be
| ironic.
| voidfunc wrote:
| Love the retro look and feel for native apps but yea, it
| doesn't feel right for a SaaS app.
| godzillabrennus wrote:
| I think it's a sign the developer is trying too hard to be
| cool...
| snozolli wrote:
| God forbid someone has fun with the design of their own
| project.
| Gormo wrote:
| Good UI design is appealing in any type of software.
| me_bx wrote:
| Some benefits I appreciate: * All the text is
| at a readable size, and had sufficient contrast with the
| background. * The clickable and interactive elements are
| easy to identify. * Text is selectable and can be copied.
| * There are no useless animations(there only to give a dynamic
| feel without having any function).
| a-dub wrote:
| fun fact: sqlite is only about 5.5 months younger than windows
| 2000...
| int_19h wrote:
| That is not an accurate reproduction of the classic Windows UI.
| The 3D bevels on buttons and other beveled elements are wrong and
| make it look more like Motif if anything.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| They should have used 98.css, but with font-face: Tahoma.
|
| https://jdan.github.io/98.css/
| BrouteMinou wrote:
| Wow, I initially thought that the first dialog box was a
| screencap of a "real" one...
|
| Impressive!
| karamanolev wrote:
| Pixel-aligned non-antialiased interfaces make it so much
| easier to reproduce. Good luck emulating current-gen
| desktop OS rendering on a different software and hardware
| stack...
| hobobaggins wrote:
| Easy to criticize, hard to actually build something.
| prezjordan wrote:
| Thank you :) A real labor of love [0] for me.
|
| [0]: https://notes.jordanscales.com/98-css-reflections
| masklinn wrote:
| Was the font really the only difference between 98 and 2k?
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| I think the colors and icons were slightly different, but
| 98 + Tahoma gets you most of the way there.
| Retr0id wrote:
| The visualiser tool seems a little broken
|
| (nodes laid out in a long diagonal line, foreign key reference
| arrows floating around and not "attached")
| zx8080 wrote:
| Clippy is an office thing, not win2k.
| jumpkick wrote:
| If I remember right, win2k had the dog. It would appear during
| Explorer search.
| cbxyp wrote:
| Strange how people are always so negative. Always with the
| nitpicking. Functionally of course 90s style UX and desktop
| productivity has always been far higher. Palantir's blueprint UI
| doesn't even specifically target mobile.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| Yeah, seems many people can just moan online. At least I hope
| they aren't like this in daily life... It is pretty annoying
| how, while the HN audience grew steadily, from the 'wow great
| how you made this' went to 'this is crap and a joke' basically.
| Or maybe it's my memory and it was always quite bad, but then I
| don't really want to know; I find shooting down projects,
| unless they _actually_ are super low effort (while asking
| money) or claiming blatant untruths (FOSS while it 's not), is
| some kind of insecurity thing broken people do.
|
| Of course reporting bugs is a good thing, but that's not just
| burning down someone's efforts willy nilly.
| bpiroman wrote:
| lol that's pretty cool!
| snozolli wrote:
| I like it, and I laughed out loud when Clippy popped up. That
| bastard came out when my college ran everything from slow network
| drives. He'd bring the system to a grinding halt, unless you were
| on one of the few workstations with a local hard drive.
| debarshri wrote:
| Looks like it is enterprise ready interface.
| yas_hmaheshwari wrote:
| Haha, true
|
| Finally, an interface that matches our enterprise COBOL
| codebase, perfect for Y2K-compliant enterprises of 1999 :-)
| vekatimest wrote:
| Functional but looks nothing like Windows 2000 beyond the
| titlebar gradient. His name was also Clippit, never Clippy in any
| Office product (MS started calling him that after he was removed,
| since everyone else was getting it wrong)
| nokun7 wrote:
| I thought Windows 2000 was a typo.
| layer8 wrote:
| What could it possibly be a typo of?
| nokun7 wrote:
| Something relatively modern. Wasn't Win2k a failed product?
| n144q wrote:
| Windows Me?
| layer8 wrote:
| My point is, I don't know of anything modern that is
| spelled sufficiently similar to "Windows 2000" for the
| latter to be a plausible typo of it.
|
| Windows 2000 was quite successful, and was the most
| reliable Windows version so far.
| hliyan wrote:
| The user experience is so (paradoxically) refreshing. Back then
| you could fit so much useful information and controls into a
| single screenful; interfaces responded instantly; it was easy to
| figure where things are and what I'm looking at. With "modern"
| UIs, you can't get a big picture of what you're working on
| because there is so much white space and scrolling; the
| application is slower than your fingers; with each application,
| you have to learn the designer's "vision" in order to figure out
| where things are and what you're looking at.
| ksvarma wrote:
| Very well said, sometimes I feel the modern stack could re-
| learn and improve.
| IshKebab wrote:
| > interfaces responded instantly
|
| I wish this nostalgic myth would die. Back in the Win 9x days
| we all had laughably slow spinning disks and hardly any RAM.
| Interfaces for simple programs like Minesweeper and Notepad
| were instant, sure. But anything heavy like Word, IE, Encarta,
| Visual Studio, etc. were definitely not.
|
| Most of those kinds of apps are way faster now than they were
| in the 90s, mostly thanks to SSDs. (Visual Studio is a notable
| exception - they really screwed it up after 6.0.)
| daliz wrote:
| > Most of those kinds of apps are way faster now than they
| were in the 90s
|
| I strongly disagree.
| exe34 wrote:
| when you click save or when memory has to be paged/loaded,
| etc, yes.
|
| when it comes to responding to user input - while memory is
| being swapped, yes.
|
| in contrast, even when the computer wasn't responding, it
| never lost keystrokes. I'd type ahead and then the characters
| would appear when it was ready.
|
| now, the windows computer just randomly loses characters and
| loses focus for no reason. if it's not paying attention when
| you're typing or clicking, it just won't respond.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Windows doesn't randomly lose characters or focus for me.
| sempron64 wrote:
| Re: losing focus: Maybe this a problem with tap to click
| on a touchpad? This happens to me and drives me crazy and
| it's invariably me inadvertently clicking with my palms.
| Disabling tap to click helps a lot.
| exe34 wrote:
| I use an external keyboard, but I'm referring to the
| cases where popups and various things taking their time
| and showing up and disappearing. e.g. if I open teams and
| switch to something else, when teams finishes loading it
| comes to the front of the screen instead of staying in
| its lane. so it steals focus from say a text editor. it's
| like the user is supposed to be really dumb and slow, so
| you're meant to click on teams and wait a few minutes for
| it to load properly and then start interacting with the
| computer again.
| dspillett wrote:
| My problem with Windows today is it taking so long
| waiting for it to switch focus sometimes. If I don't
| artificially wait, a few keystrokes go to the previous
| target or off into the aether.
| exe34 wrote:
| that's one of my issues with it, but forgot to specify -
| I really really hate clicking or typing and having to do
| it again.
| tl wrote:
| It's a biased viewpoint, but it's not nostalgia. The
| following all happened to me:
|
| - 486 Packard Bell that I upgraded ram from 4MB -> 12MB as a
| kid? Win 3.1 went from being slow period to Windows 95 being
| fast any time I didn't touch disk or CD-ROM.
|
| - ZSNES on Pentium MMX? Zero lag gameplay with time-travel
| debugging and full memory view.
|
| - DOS running on a Pentium 4 to support legacy software?
| Nearly instant everything, especially power on -> usable
| machine.
|
| You'll notice a common thread. It was _possible_ to outrun
| the demons of sluggishness back then.
| chungy wrote:
| It is no myth. Go try a Windows 2000 system and compare it to
| today. Windows 2000 will respond a lot faster (often
| instant), even on complex applications.
| rekabis wrote:
| I ran this test myself when another obsolete bit of Y2K kit
| recently fell into my hands: even with a 256Gb spinning-
| rust drive and 1Gb of RAM, just using Windows Explorer to
| copy, move, and delete files took a fraction of the time my
| main rig did.
|
| And my main rig is a Dell T7920 running Win11 Pro for
| Workstations 24h2, with a Gen4 TLC NVMe directly attached
| to the Gen3 PCIe bus (at 7,000/6,900Mbps it can totally
| saturate its channel), 256Gb of 3200Mhz DDR4 LRDIMMs
| (4x32Gb), and dual 8C/16T Intel Silver 4110 CPUs.
|
| By any measure, my current rig should have blown the Win2k
| machine out of the water. The Win2k machine did the file
| operations _in HALF THE F**KING TIME_
| narag wrote:
| _But anything heavy like Word, IE, Encarta, Visual Studio,
| etc. were definitely not._
|
| At any given point, old applications are faster and current
| applications are slow, slowness being unevenly distributed:
| if you can pay extra for bigger memory and CPU, you get to
| use the fast lane.
|
| Also consider that companies balance a number of factors:
| costs for themselves, time to market, features, what the
| competition offers. New, more powerful hardware is an
| opportunity for them to make sloppy software cheaper and
| first to launch.
| FpUser wrote:
| >"Most of those kinds of apps are way faster now"
|
| Some calculation intensive parts sure are thanks to modern
| CPU with plenty of cache and RAM and multiple cores.
|
| GUI on the other hand are often atrocious
| cjs_ac wrote:
| It's worth remembering you had far fewer pixels to play with; I
| remember 800x600 and 1024x768 being the standard monitor
| resolutions of the day.
| Narishma wrote:
| I think that's a poor excuse. Screen resolutions are higher
| now but our machines are also orders of magnitude more
| powerful.
| hot_gril wrote:
| A lot of modern websites even add an intentional delay for
| buttons to respond or even load because it "looks nice."
| lesuorac wrote:
| Unsure what exactly counts as "looks nice" but I'll often add
| an intentional delay to buttons whose actions are near
| instantaneous but not great to do multiple times so that you
| don't accidentally click it twice.
| miunau wrote:
| This is an old practice suggested by HCI research going back
| decades
| ksvarma wrote:
| Wow what a work, this is truly joy to go back in years. Great
| job.
| thomastay wrote:
| I think it's pretty cool that the source code is all in a single
| file called app.js, and it's just doing simple DOM manipulations,
| no React, no minification, no libraries. I like to think it's
| just written like that too, a gigantic file that the author just
| iterates on.
| akpa1 wrote:
| It's incredibly refreshing to see that you can still build
| decently complex web apps without a huge swath of JS build
| tools
| GranPC wrote:
| And that's the "magic" that makes it so snappy and fast to
| load. I built a web-based game just like that and I am
| confident that my choice not to use any of the "modern web dev
| stack" is the reason I managed to hit my 60 FPS performance
| target on an iPhone 6s in 2024.
| hobobaggins wrote:
| Show HN!
| GranPC wrote:
| I'd have loved to, but because of its nature as a live game
| show with cash prizes, it required that the user signs up
| with their phone number, as a way to make botting and
| multi-account a bit harder. I know that wouldn't go over
| well with the audience here.
|
| The game is no more, but maybe I could put together a
| little post talking about the more interesting problems I
| had to tackle, and showing the animations I am the most
| proud of. Maybe some day!
| self_awareness wrote:
| Is is still very far from a Windows 2000 interface. But it's
| still better than most of the websites.
| checker659 wrote:
| Oh man. Twinkle in the eyes.
| FpUser wrote:
| I love it. It looks so clean and functional.
| gcr wrote:
| This reminds me a lot of Datasette.io. See example power plant
| data: https://global-power-plants.datasettes.com/global-power-
| plan...
| scoutforge wrote:
| That UI is... something else. Reminds me of some old database
| tools I used at Scout Forge, we even wrote some blog posts about
| similar ones. Think it's actually usable for anything beyond a
| quick peek?
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(page generated 2025-01-26 23:01 UTC)