For some reason I keep seeing people on HN showing their sites that recreate desktop environments—almost always in the style of Windows, and frequently in the 90s ‘concrete slabs’ look.
P.S. BTW, using PCjs one can actually run Windows 1 to 95 in the browser (and a bunch of other OSes). Alternatively, there's Dosbox—which Archive.org uses for emulation in the browser, and which likewise can run some versions of Windows. So one could really make their site as proper files in the virtual computer, though loading is gonna be a bit rough.
Agreed that Windows 93 is a hard one to beat. My plan is to try and beat them all eventually, but I am patient and enjoy making the app. I've had this idea for quite a while but only in the last few years felt confident enough in my skills to attempt it.
As for more sites recreating the web desktop idea, here is a great list:
10 years ago i did this classic-mac-a-like. But actually... I sorta liked most of the Win98 UI. Sure, there were weird corners like trying to confuse printers and control panels as files, but it was the beginning if msft paying attention to UX concepts an A11Y.
Call me a weirdo, but I thought the color-reduxed / high-contrast theme for Win2k was the apex of MSFT UIs.
I actually have v86 on my system which can also run things like PCjs. And I have jsdos which uses dosbox to play DOS. I also have BoxedWine for running 16/32-bit apps.
Yes there seems to be a limitation with the same URL and iframe nesting. If you add arbitrary query params then it will load. This happens on Chromium browsers afaik.
Just FYi, McAfee says there a is a GenericRXHB Trojan included in the code... I think it fired when i opened the ski game. Possibly just a false positive from the emulator?
Thanks very much! I hope one day to go beyond proof of concept and have this site actual be an alternative to some of the stuff you'd do on the desktop. But for now I am happy to just keep adding stuff.
I love this! This is the kind of interesting stuff I thought I'd be working on before I became a software developer and got disappointed by the day to day CRUD, JS framework nonsense, Agile cesspool it turned into.
This is amazing! I wasn’t able to play the llama song using winamp though. Winamp would open and no matter what buttons I pressed, the song never played.
Running iOS - Safari.
Thanks! Interesting bug, appreciate the report. Thanks to https://www.browserstack.com/open-source I have access to iOS Safari, so I will look into fixing this.
So all that data is valid? Are you sure you want all that first grade personal info out there publicly? Probably makes ID theft and a lot more way too easy for any scammers no!?
I can't reply to your comment from 55 days ago so I'm doing it here. I was obsessed with hatshoe.org when I was in high school. I wish the author would reveal himself and give kind of an explanation about what he was going for. That was a cool site.
I also host my blog on there and all my pictures. As for things it can do, quite a bit actually, but many of them are proof of concept as the underlying tech is not yet at desktop speeds. I have a decent list in the https://github.com/DustinBrett/daedalOS/blob/main/README.md.
Could you please clarify which thing? Also if you are interested in how something on it is done, all the code is here https://github.com/DustinBrett/daedalOS
I've spent the last 16 months working on this app/site. It's my passion side project to build a functional desktop environment in the browser.
Here is the source code: https://github.com/DustinBrett/daedalOS