Websites that look like desktop GUIs • Hacker News Board

Re: Websites that look like desktop GUIs

#71

Post by captbaritone » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 11:08 PM UTC

JoshGlazebrook wrote: post #54

Crash0v3rid3 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really miss Winamp!

Man I had so many custom skins for Winamp. It really was a different time back then.

I (author of Webamp) worked with the internet archive to archive ~50k Winamp skins. The collection even features Webamp integration is you can try them out in the browser. https://archive.org/details/winampskins

Re: Websites that look like desktop GUIs

#72

Post by pcurve » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 11:22 PM UTC

Crash0v3rid3 wrote: post #47

MeanSpirit wrote: post #34

https://webamp.org/ this really took me back! Even the equalizer works, and the magnetic window stickiness!

I really miss Winamp!

Can't you still use it? I still use it.

Re: Websites that look like desktop GUIs

#73

Post by optymizer » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 11:28 PM UTC

MeanSpirit wrote: post #34

https://webamp.org/ this really took me back! Even the equalizer works, and the magnetic window stickiness!

I stumbled on rahul.io and was blown away: includes word, webamp and wolf3d!

Re: Websites that look like desktop GUIs

#74

Post by ajsharp » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 11:31 PM UTC

This is amazing.

Re: Websites that look like desktop GUIs

#75

Post by hiisukun » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 11:36 PM UTC

Thanks for the excellent link. I enjoyed the site, and the fun little easter egg for removing the 'bugs'.

I was browsing on a very low powered device, so some of it took quite some time to load.. just to emulate things that would have run on a device 10% as powerful as this! How ironic.

Re: Websites that look like desktop GUIs

#76

Post by neilv » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 11:51 PM UTC

The first time I saw a GUI desktop (Win95-like) in a Web browser, it was done by one of the prominent kernel developers. Either a proof of concept, or a hack for fun, or both.

It was especially impressive, because this was when Web developers were mostly concerned with things like rounding corners of rectangles in layouts. Then some non-Web person is passing by, and says, hey, y'know, it looks like one thing you could do with this now is... :)

Re: Websites that look like desktop GUIs

#77

Post by acwan93 » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 11:51 PM UTC

coding123 wrote: post #31

I'm curious about the tech in some of these. Probably a mix of straight up HTML reinterpretation, probably some web assembly, feels like at least one or two are running a full win9x dist in either docker or something...

There's some frameworks that are available for old Windows desktop apps to run in the browser. It's main use is for old ERP systems that were originally written for on-premise to be deployed in the cloud and browser based without needing to essentially rewrite everything.

The one tech stack I know of that does this is IBM Websphere for Java apps (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_WebSphere). One that isn't as smooth as the site in OP is Microsoft's Remote Desktop Service.

Re: Websites that look like desktop GUIs

#78

Post by iamnewhere2020 » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 11:53 PM UTC

captbaritone wrote: post #65

Etheryte wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The visualizers in this are really slick, I wonder if they're built from scratch or borrowed from somewhere.

The visualizer comes from https://github.com/jberg/butterchurn glad you like it!

any change of getting AVS here? I spent years playing with that!

Re: Websites that look like desktop GUIs

#79

Post by symlinkk » Sat, Jul 04, 2020, 11:57 PM UTC

What's funny is web development has surpassed desktop development so much that it's easier to make websites that look like desktop apps than making actual desktop apps.

Re: Websites that look like desktop GUIs

#80

Post by neuromute » Sun, Jul 05, 2020, 12:03 AM UTC

I started work on one of these a couple of years back. Never actually finished it (is anything ever truly finished?!). It’s got a media player with milkdrop visualiser (you can control the presets with left and right on the keyboard), a terminal (with matrix effect via the command with the same name), various settings and apps. I had a drum machine in there, but removed it because it was a bit messy code-wise. Wanna get some emulators in there, my previous site had an awesome JS NES emulator virtual arcade easter egg that was triggered via the Konami code. This web OS experiment is built in jQuery, but I’m inclined to port it over to Vue at some point.

Link, for those that are interested: https://os.virusav.com

Note: the name VirusAV might seem ominous, but it stands for Virus AudioVisual. I’m a coder, VJ, DJ and music producer.