3 ms·

A web os; it's full recreation of the Lisa Office System GUI in Javascript. The entire thing is output to a single canvas element, which has forced me to write

by ayaros 1y ago

A web os; it's full recreation of the Lisa Office System GUI in Javascript. The entire thing is output to a single canvas element, which has forced me to write a number of the UI components from scratch that I'd normally take for granted. It's got an IndexedDB filesystem, and it's got apps. I'm almost done working on the first real app for it - a word processor akin to LisaWrite. Once I roll that out, I intend to do a ShowHN post.

rhet0rica 1y ago
I never knew how much I needed this. Is it just a skin over JS apps, or have you done any work imitating the software architecture?
- ayaros 1y ago
  Thanks! The answer is neither; it isn't remotely imitating the Lisa's architecture, nor is it a skin over some other previously written JS code. To be clear: this is absolutely NOT a CSS skin. The only CSS involved is used for the positioning of the canvas element on the page, and for the styling of the temporary UI elements which mimic the Lisa's hardware test screen (and those that display as a fallback if JS is disabled). When the system "boots" all those temporary elements are replaced with a single canvas element on which the UI is displayed. I should perhaps have been less modest in my original comment in that all of the UI components are coded from scratch. This includes a hierarchical system for displaying objects on the canvas (not dissimilar to the the DOM), the windowing system, a typesetting system, multiple systems for displaying and storing image data, and much more. I've written what I hesitate to call a graphics engine, but I guess that's sort of what it is... it even supports 1-bit blending modes. This was originally going to be more along the lines of a CSS skin, but I became so deeply frustrated with visual inconsistencies across browser engines and platforms that I ultimately decided to move all the logic I could into JS. The result is what you see now.
  - rhet0rica 1y ago
    Oh, gosh, I didn't mean a CSS skin, just, like, a frontend over custom/modern software with sensible design patterns meant to be sensible on modern hardware. I'm guessing alpha.lisagui.com is the URL; it's pretty slick!
    - ayaros 1y ago
      Yes, that's pretty much correct! "Sensible" is debatable... And that's the URL! (Guess I figured I'd emphasize that point before people start mistaking it for yet-another-CSS-skin™...)

by ayaros 1y ago

rhet0rica 1y ago

I never knew how much I needed this. Is it just a skin over JS apps, or have you done any work imitating the software architecture?

ayaros 1y ago
Thanks! The answer is neither; it isn't remotely imitating the Lisa's architecture, nor is it a skin over some other previously written JS code. To be clear: this is absolutely NOT a CSS skin. The only CSS involved is used for the positioning of the canvas element on the page, and for the styling of the temporary UI elements which mimic the Lisa's hardware test screen (and those that display as a fallback if JS is disabled). When the system "boots" all those temporary elements are replaced with a single canvas element on which the UI is displayed. I should perhaps have been less modest in my original comment in that all of the UI components are coded from scratch. This includes a hierarchical system for displaying objects on the canvas (not dissimilar to the the DOM), the windowing system, a typesetting system, multiple systems for displaying and storing image data, and much more. I've written what I hesitate to call a graphics engine, but I guess that's sort of what it is... it even supports 1-bit blending modes. This was originally going to be more along the lines of a CSS skin, but I became so deeply frustrated with visual inconsistencies across browser engines and platforms that I ultimately decided to move all the logic I could into JS. The result is what you see now.
- rhet0rica 1y ago
  Oh, gosh, I didn't mean a CSS skin, just, like, a frontend over custom/modern software with sensible design patterns meant to be sensible on modern hardware. I'm guessing alpha.lisagui.com is the URL; it's pretty slick!
  - ayaros 1y ago
    Yes, that's pretty much correct! "Sensible" is debatable... And that's the URL! (Guess I figured I'd emphasize that point before people start mistaking it for yet-another-CSS-skin™...)