This is a web OS I wrote in vanilla JS that looks like the Apple Lisa Office System (1983-85), with other contemporaneous influences and additional improvements and features. It's currently in alpha and isn't remotely bug free. I had been holding off on posting this here until it was somewhat presentable and useful. Please note; the Lisa conforms more literally to the desktop metaphor than most modern GUIs - some of the important differences are mentioned in the readme.
This is a complete recreation of the UI in JS; it all renders to a single canvas element. It's not a CSS theme, and not an emulator ported to JS. None of the code is written by Apple. I'll be happy to elaborate more in the comments, but the short version is the entire UI is defined outside the DOM using JS objects. Thus, every interface element - menus, windows, controls, and even typefaces - was recreated from scratch. There are no font files - I wrote my own typesetting system, which supports combining multiple text styles and generates new glyph variants on the fly.
Many of the technical decisions I made were motivated by a desire to have this look the same in every browser. That's harder to do with the DOM and CSS, and why I moved as much logic as I could to JS. Also, the only part of the project outside of vanilla JS and standard web APIs is the Gulp toolkit, which I'm using as a minification/build tool. No vibe coding was used to make this!
This is based on a UI from the 80s, and won't work well on your phone. If you insist on running it that way, turn on trackpad mode in the touchscreen settings panel of the preferences app. For best results, install it as a PWA (add it to your home screen). Also there are some odd Android bugs; the native touchscreen keyboard is currently broken, and there's an issue with the cursor when dragging windows.
I realize there's not a whole lot to do within LisaGUI right now; I've got a big list of additional features and apps I'll be adding in the future. I've been working on this project for a while, and I'm eager to hear people's feedback and answer questions about it.
The good news is, if you have a large enough low-dpi display, and you make the window big enough, the automatic integer scaling settings will kick in, and the pixels themselves will be displayed larger. This can be forced via the preferences app (under the display options). If you screw this up, then restart LisaGUI while holding the shift key to reset the scaling settings.
EDIT: Unrelated to this, there are a couple minor bugs with PWAs on iOS relating to the positioning of the canvas. These can be resolved by rotating your device to a different orientation and then rotating it back to the original position... but this is annoying.
EDIT 2: To close windows, just double click the icon in the titlebar! This "collapses the window back into an icon."
To get the canvas to be consistently smooth, I had to apply a lot of contrast using a CSS filter, and I set image-rendering to pixelated, IIRC.
If we're talking about pixel perfect rendering there are various issues in the Web APIs that conspire against you.
devicePixelRatio (dpr) - This is supposed to tell you how many CSS pixels = one device pixel. This particular demo ignores it. On my Windows PC my dpr is 1.25 and the site looks horrendous with every other pixel 4th pixel of a font being double wide (or something along those lines). Not dissing the demo, it's cool. It's uncommon for Web devs to be aware of these issues as like 99.99% are on a Mac and never set zoom to anything other then 100%
The idea was supposed to be, you could take the CSS size and multiply by devicePixelRatio to get the display size. Unfortunately that does not work for various reasons.
There's zoom. Firefox and Chrome change the devicePixelRatio in response to zooming. Safari does not. Even if Safari supported this it's not enough. You can maybe repo how bad the site looks on my Windows PC on a Mac by zooming in on any browser (pick zoom from the menus, not pinch to zoom - see below)
Next there is pixel snapping. The short version is, imagine your window is 3 pixels wide and you ask the browser to make 2 elements side by side each 50% wide. If you check the CSS width both elements will say they are 1.5 pixels wide (getContentBoundingRect().width). But the browser won't display a 1.5 pixel element. I will snap one element 2 pixels and the other 1 pixel. To find out which is which you're supposed to use ResizeObserver with devicePixelContentBoxSize, but again Safari doesn't support this. It's not just with splits, that just the easiest way to demo the issue. Get this wrong and your checkerboard background will have a stripe somewhere where the checkerboard is missing a row or column.
Next there is pinch to zoom. It's separate and reported no where in the Web API AFAICT. The browsers will re-render text/svg to a higher resolution when you pinch to zoom but they don't pass that info to the page so it can not re-render canvases in response.
So: tl;dr, you can't - partly because of Safari. Partly because the Web is missing functionality
I would love to see a breakout style game or something in the demo/examples but that is my inner child speaking.
That's a good game idea. The next game I'm going to do will be solitaire. I was also thinking of trying to eventually make something like the mazewar game from the Xerox Alto to pay my respects to Xerox, although I know that will be an undertaking, especially adding in networking...
If things appear uneven, these issues may be due to viewing the screen at 1x scale on a lower-DPI display, as I mentioned in another comment. The only way for me to debug these issues is with a screenshot. You can press Windows + PrintScreen to take a screenshot on Windows, or press Command + Shift + 3 on a Mac. You can send them to me using the email link at the bottom of https://yaros.ae/ or by messaging me on Bluesky (https://bsky.app/profile/lisagui.com).
Also, I've been posting project updates to the Bluesky account, and I'll continue to do so in the future for anyone interested in keeping up with the project. There's also an RSS link on my website for anyone who's old-school and doesn't want to make a Bluesky account.
(Edit: Menus staying open after one click was a welcome improvement that I think came much later.)
There's at least one Mac extension I know of that lets you use sticky menus on earlier versions of Mac OS, like System 6. I figured I'd backport that feature a little further, so to speak...
EDIT: Also, forgot to mention it in this reply, but you double click the titlebar icon to close the window.
Setting aside specifically places something on the desktop. Save-able documents have a "save and put away" option which "refiles" it back in its folder without putting it on the desktop.
You made me realize I still need to add a separate "put away" option on all windows regardless, so there's always a menu command that can be used to refile something.
The desktop isn't a normal directory - I discuss this in the readme a bit.
Something I recommend doing for the mouse cursor on mobile is to make it work like Microsoft’s Remote Desktop on iOS (possibly Android too, but I’m an iPhone user so don’t know for sure) where the cursor isn’t where you tap on the screen, but you kind of pan anywhere on the screen which proportionally moves the cursor which is somewhere not under your finger. It’s a bit hard to explain, you just need to try using RDP on Microsoft’s free Windows App on your mobile device.
Also checked with an online solver and it verified that there was no solution.
Incidentally, I'm planning on adding solitaire as the next game!
Also, I was just checking around to see if there were any good methods for telling if a puzzle is solvable without solving it. Seems geeks for geeks have some code for it.
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/dsa/check-instance-15-puzzle-s... The only other solution I can think of is detecting both configurations (blank in bottom right or top left) and displaying something when either is reached.
Half of the random states created are solvable, and the other half are unsolvable.
My solution was not checking if the puzzle is solvable (the mathematics of this seem complicated), but starting with a solved one and then do a fixed number of random movements.
But sheesh! The first time I play the numbers puzzle on a computer in my life, and the first time in 30 years that I play it at all, and I find out some joker has snapped two of the pieces out and reversed them, making it unsolvable?! Diabolical!
Cool stuff though!
If this is causing any confusion I might put a priority on saving this setting in a way where it can be applied immediately as the page is loaded.
Edit: doing nothing will do the autoselect. Odd