I'm interested.
No screenshots or docs of any kind linked to, just a demo, becuase "The demo account has temporarily been closed due to abuse. Come back soon."
This is one reason why screenshots and docs are good!
Orb is a free and open source web desktop
91–100 of 146 posts
Re: Orb is a free and open source web desktop
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally I can see myself using this to access my homelab from work without having to open extra ports. Since I can't install a personal VPN client on my work machine, a web-based desktop behind a login would give me most of what I want.
Why not guacamole or smth
Or have a real desktop without coding? [1]
Re: Orb is a free and open source web desktop
#93I love seeing more web desktops as I think it's an amazingly fun side project. It's interesting to me seeing how far people will go with these. I've been working on mine for several years now. Also open source if anyone is interested in checking it out.
Re: Orb is a free and open source web desktop
#94General question: Is there an actual use for this kinds of projects, beyond showing what can be done? I have seen many different "web desktop" projects and while most of them were impressive in their own (technical) ways, I could never see the an actual use case for them.
As someone who has spent years working on one of these, that is a very interesting question. I do it as a passion/side project so it's not as important to me, but I also like to think of it like the "Field of Dreams" philosophy of "If You Build It, They Will Come". I hope one day if I add enough features and interconnect enough things, the applicability will show itself.
Re: Orb is a free and open source web desktop
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Silly point as jQuery is a few kilobytes meanwhile your custom font is a few megs.
I feel like if you are worried about 30kb, you're probably also not using custom fonts; or you're at least not blocking rendering behind them (you're accepting FOUT). It's a reasonable argument to make that minimizing 3rd-party library use is premature optimization for most websites, but if you get to the point where you need that optimization then it is 30kb and it won't be cached (CDN caching is a myth, CDNs are on…
You're making the assumption that the developer has any input in the matter.
Re: Orb is a free and open source web desktop
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been evaluating some self-hosted/open source company management systems this weekend. Most of them are classic multi-page PHP apps. It's terrible. I can't stand how it always reloads each time I click on something. I remember it didn't bother me much in the past when everything was like that, but today we have much better options. I went for a SaaS built as a SPA. When I click on something, for example to create…
> I can't stand how it always reloads each time I click on something. And yet here you are, using HackerNews just about every day, which works exactly the same way. No SPA. No 'forever loading', just a classic, fast SSR webapp that treats individual pieces of content as documents, just like how the web was designed to work.
Let's be clear, Hacker News is likely the fastest SSR websites that most people have ever used.
Re: Orb is a free and open source web desktop
#97One of my biggest pet peeves that frustrate me more about Open Source projects is this bizarre tendency not to put screenshots in the main description; especially for projects that are mainly UI/UX-based.
I realize there's a demo, but what if I'm on mobile and I'm just curious as to what the project looks like; or what if I just want to see what it looks like before I try it out?
Is it a nerd thing, where we're just kind of wrapped up so far in our own projects that we forget such a basic thing? Why does this happen so often? Genuinely asking.
Re: Orb is a free and open source web desktop
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like if you are worried about 30kb, you're probably also not using custom fonts; or you're at least not blocking rendering behind them (you're accepting FOUT). It's a reasonable argument to make that minimizing 3rd-party library use is premature optimization for most websites, but if you get to the point where you need that optimization then it is 30kb and it won't be cached (CDN caching is a myth, CDNs are on…
You're making the assumption that the developer has any input in the matter.
In which case it makes even less sense for someone to complain about reducing Javascript bloat just because a web font that a developer doesn't control and doesn't have any input over exists.
I am sympathetic that worrying about 30kb is overkill for a lot of apps. But if you are in a position where you're really optimizing for speed to the point where even megabytes matter, then those 30kb are not cached and they block page logic from executing until they're downloaded. And that remains true even if there's another performance change that would be higher impact that you're not allowed to make.
If anything, being not allowed to reduce asset size for your website would make efficient JS bundling matter more, since it's one of the few resource bundles you'd be allowed to do something about and it would be pulling double-duty to try and slightly cover for the inefficient fetches that you can't change.
Re: Orb is a free and open source web desktop
#99I really like the idea of a web based desktop, but I would like to see innovation in the user interfaces of computers.
One idea I am playing with is the idea of "thunking" behaviours on a graphical user interface by chaining together operations, like a typed runqueue. You can interact immediately with what is on the screen but you are presented with options as if the operation was successful and then you can queue up the next thing based on the result of doing that.
EDIT: The idea is that we decouple updates of the GUI with execution and the types of the return values of previous operation. In other words, the types of every operation are known by the system in advance, so you know what data is available at any given point in time.
A desktop which is like a real time strategy game.
Re: Orb is a free and open source web desktop
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are only a few cases where that's true today. Probably 90% of the functions that helped a lot before have been implemented by browsers natively today.
So? The jQuery code still works regardless of when the browser decided to catch up. I picked up jQuery because JS in browsers weren't cross-compatible for ages. I don't see a need to stop unless jQuery stops being cross-compatible.
> So? The jQuery code still works regardless of when the browser decided to catch up.
So, it's not needed anymore. I also started using jQuery in order to get cross-browser support for handy stuff, but since that stuff is now cross-browser without using any 3rd party libraries at all, there is no need to use extra bandwidth and CPU cycles from your users to download something that basically already exists.