Right

So, now you’re looking at a desktop inside your desktop. Unless, if you’re using your phone, you are looking at a desktop on your phone.

Sorry.

Hey, I heard you like desktops

It started with an idea. I was busy being unhappyish about the design of my site, especially the light grey boxes with rounded corners that contained my posts and other content. They were meant to be modern and inviting and easy on the eyes. But especially the rounded corners I hated.

So a thought spawned in my head, not unlike one of those NPC scientists in Half-Life: their usefulness in perfect balance with their life expectancy. But some of those NPCs follow you around for a bit, and so did this thought. The idea was to replace the boxes with Atari ST GEM-style windows. Wouldn’t that be fun.

They would fit into the rest of the site design like an olive in a bowl of yoghurt.

But my idea wasn’t pulled up into the gaping jaws of a ceiling dweller yet. What if I moved the sidebar to the top, as a pull down menu. The bullets could have their own slashpage.

You can see how it went from there. Scan lines, but not over the pictures, modal dialogues, desktop icons and moving windows with actual scroll bars. I haven’t had so much fun with JavaScript in more than a decade.

It’s not perfect yet. The URL bar at the top of your browser at first didn’t reflect where you navigate, so reload/F5 would reset the desktop and bookmarking was impossible. I’ve solved that by keeping track of window focus and pushing/popping entries in the browser history. It’s not ideal. On phones, for now, all content windows are full screen, which makes entries readable. You can still close them and you can navigate using the menus, even though the icons might be a bit small. I do have huge other plans for smaller form factors but those will take time, if I can even pull it off. On tablets, you can’t drag windows yet, but you can maximise them.'

This site is a blog, like it was before. But it can naturally be more now. When you would land on this site, originally I wanted it to be just an empty canvas, waiting for you to start exploring, not unlike turning on a computer in the eighties. You would have to click a bit to get to the content. But as I said, this site is a blog so by default you will be presented a window with the latest five or so posts, ordered with the last one on top. I have plans for more, like more icons on the desktop, or a terminal to open posts from. I even have ideas for the trash.

Maybe people will finally stop trying to log in here using /login.php That’d be nice.

I’d love to know what you think about it.