Ephemeral Chat Box
Type your thoughts in the text box below. Hit enter to submit, and watch them fade away into the ether.
I wanted to feel like I was sending chat messages to someone, and watching them disappear. I knew of The Thoughts Room and tried it out, but its implementation left several things to be desired.
First, it has a long intro sequence that was a bit annoying when I wanted to get straight into venting.
Second, it makes a really obnoxious griding noise when your typed text falls away, which is the opposite of relaxing in my opinion.
Finally, I wanted each whole thought to disappear together, rather than have the individual words fall away.
Bugs and Other Things
Ideally, this would get entirely re-done in flexbox. The chat window uses some flex, because upon revisiting this project I decided that my former solution for displaying the text didn't convey the feeling I was trying to get at.
Because I re-wrote the chat window, there's now a bug with long messages and overlapping - I tested it with small, one line messages and didn't think about how much room multi-line messages would take up until I tested them. The chat window uses pixels for its size, and redesigning this with flex would be one step to fixing the overlap bug.
Also, in a flex redesign I'd probably leave this window always open and float it to the right of the chat box on larger screen resolutions and to the bottom on smaller resolutions. (Needless to say this page is not currently optimised for mobile devices, being a quick and dirty project.)