Word Perhect

http://wordperhect.net/

by cardamomo • 12 years ago

152 66 12 years ago

wordperhect.net

cardamomo5• 12 years ago

There are some great UI ideas here:

* Bored button

* Simplified thesaurus

* Down-to-earth spell-check system

ryan-allen• 12 years ago

I'd like to be able to order coffee from within my word processor!

sejje• 12 years ago

I think you need emacs for that.

bdcravens3• 12 years ago

Good to see that Flash animators can still find an occasional project.

quink2• 12 years ago

This was made 15 years ago.

bdcravens3• 12 years ago

Ok, that makes sense. Didn't see a date on the site. Shouldn't the title have [1999] on HN then?

mcmire• 12 years ago

Thanks for this, I needed a laugh today.

jestar_jokin• 12 years ago

Looks like this was made in 1999. Say what you like about Flash, at least it still works 15 years later.

cardamomo5• 12 years ago

Sure, but so does this: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

blowski3• 12 years ago

Even on iPhones (unlike the OP).

mcescalante• 12 years ago

A nice little writeup about the site from summer 2000: http://www.thingsmagazine.net/text/t12/wordperhect.htm

cardamomo5• 12 years ago

Reading a little bit more about the artist's background and so on makes me wonder what such a project might look like if it were created today.

cardamomo5• 12 years ago

Along those lines, here's a description of the project from the commissioning organization, e-2.org:

As word processing software becomes ever more advanced, correcting syntax and spelling errors, these familiar programmes begin to impose a standardised corporate language onto our writing.
Takahashi has produced her own fully functioning online version which undermines this dehumanising process. Reclaiming the initiative back from the software, Word Perhect presents an idiosyncratic hand-drawn interface leading to a set of functioning but strangely altered tools.

http://www.e-2.org/commissions/wordperhect.html

quink2• 12 years ago

And yet more: http://www.chisenhale.org.uk/archive/exhibitions/index.php?i...

zak_mc_kracken• 12 years ago

And it continues to be the #1 language for all the mainstream game web sites.

Flash is not going anywhere any time soon.

lotsofmangos2• 12 years ago

Unity 3d exporting to js/webgl is one of the death knells. A decent js/webgl authoring environment written in js/webgl cannot be too far off.

bdcravens3• 12 years ago

There's a lot of "dead" languages that have specialized use and continue to feed people. However, the world where Flash was supposed to be an ubiquitous business platform is much different than developing games.

nailer2• 12 years ago

On Windows desktops (a tiny portion of current web browsers) maybe. Can't view it here and I suspect I'm not alone.

SwellJoe2• 12 years ago

What OS are you using? It runs fine on my Fedora Linux machine. Admittedly, I did just install the latest Flash yesterday because I got tired of Facebook videos not working (I kept wanting to watch videos friends had posted about the cop murdering an unarmed kid in Ferguson).

I don't like or trust Flash very much, but it does work pretty well on Linux these days.

ghshephard• 12 years ago

...except that it doesn't. Even Adobe had stopped supporting it on the mobile platform.

symmetricsaurus• 12 years ago

Well, that explains the horrible JPG quality.

allegory• 12 years ago

Well actually it doesn't for me. It says "you need flash" which is a sod because I'm sitting on a Sun Ultra 60 which doesn't have Flash...

unfamiliar• 12 years ago

And the interface graphics are even retina ready!

Eiriksmal• 12 years ago

That is certainly a feat, but I think the more impressive part of this project is funding the web domain and server for 15 years!

In another recent HN article concerning the "screenshot all the things" guy, someone mentioned that they continually run across bookmarks they've saved from interesting sites only two or three years old that now 404--not to mention links from blog posts more than a year or two old.

[Which brings to mind StackExchange. (Socially) enforcing that users copy an answer's text from an external website for future posterity is brilliant.]

Houshalter• 12 years ago

Web archive usually works for links that have broken. But link rot is a serious problem: http://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs#link-rot

In a 2003 experiment, Fetterly et al. discovered that about one link out of every 200 disappeared each week from the Internet. McCown et al. (2005) discovered that half of the URLs cited in D-Lib Magazine articles were no longer accessible 10 years after publication [the irony!], and other studies have shown link rot in academic literature to be even worse (Spinellis, 2003, Lawrence et al., 2001). Nelson and Allen (2002) examined link rot in digital libraries and found that about 3% of the objects were no longer accessible after one year.
Bruce Schneier remarks that one friend experienced 50% linkrot in one of his pages over less than 9 years (not that the situation was any better in 1998), and that his own blog posts link to news articles that go dead in days; the Internet Archive has estimated the average lifespan of a Web page at 100 days. A Science study looked at articles in prestigious journals; they didn’t use many Internet links, but when they did, 2 years later ~13% were dead. The French company Linterweb studied external links on the French Wikipedia before setting up their cache of French external links, and found - back in 2008 - already 5% were dead. (The English Wikipedia has seen a 2010-2011 spike from a few thousand dead links to ~110,000 out of ~17.5m live links.) The dismal studies just go on and on and on (and on). Even in a highly stable, funded, curated environment, link rot happens anyway. For example, about 11% of Arab Spring-related tweets were gone within a year (even though Twitter is - currently - still around).

leoh• 12 years ago

  /*<![CDATA[*/
  /* hide from ie5 mac \*/

Gracana• 12 years ago

that's good advice for anyone

raldi• 12 years ago

Can someone summarize it for those of us who don't have Flash?

fidz• 12 years ago

I only get this. Opening from my mobile

http://wordperhect.net/images/perhect-noflash.gif

zevyoura• 12 years ago

It's a parody of a word processor that lets you "handwrite" on scraps of paper and such, with lots of semi-useless buttons like a spell check that tells you to look words up in a dictionary.

cardamomo5• 12 years ago

It's sort of a re-imagined word processor (implemented in Flash). It lets you select an from an array of things to write on (masking tape, back of a phone bill, a lighter, etc.) and what size and level of messiness you want to write with.

Some standard word processing functions are implemented in surprising ways. "Deleting" just scribbles out a word. "Cut" suggests that you print the document first and then cut it up.

Other buttons in the editor window are more playful in nature. A "bored" button suggests that you go outside and play, for example.

brianjesse• 12 years ago

even the name of this is funny, well done

siddboots• 12 years ago

I sat reading the tips for a good fifteen minutes.

    Did you know... 
    Clouds are passing by all the time.

    Did you know...
    You can go outside right now if you like.

    Did you know...
    Every single grass of the loam is casting shadows individually when it is sunny.

miahi• 12 years ago

Help topics are also great.

  Bold

  No hair. or. daring. or type of writing.
  There's none of it in word perhect.

m_mueller• 12 years ago

It's nice how they've used one of the creator's Jenglish (or simulation thereof) for comedic effect, see the help files for example.

tempodox2• 12 years ago

Wonderful. We should make all of Windoze like that.

ejr• 12 years ago

Try opening existing files. It's a treasure trove!

danielweber• 12 years ago

I don't know why, but "help for word perhect help" felt very inspired.

skrowl• 12 years ago

Flash? Really? In 2014?

...Or is the OP just missing (1997) or whatever in the title?

syncsynchalt• 12 years ago

1999.

lowlevel• 12 years ago

I can only seem to scribble out one character and not entire words. Useless.

colanderman• 12 years ago

Psh. This guy implemented an entire operating system in Flash: http://www.deanliou.com/winrg/

bkurtz13• 12 years ago

Am I the only one here who didn't really find this amusing or charming, but tedious and pointless?

I guess that's art for you...

jvagner• 12 years ago

"Art" is such a horribly abused word.

ihuman• 12 years ago

Art used to be something to cherish. Now literally anything could be art. This post is art.

Word Perhect

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