Show HN: I wrote a "web OS" based on the Apple Lisa's UI, with 1-bit graphics
alpha.lisagui.comThis 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.
Works perfectly in Desktop Google Chrome. And on a 13 year old computer, running in Javascript, is lightning fast. Just shows how lean software can be and how responsive a desktop environment should be. Not that it was that fast originally. Never used a Lisa, but did use an original Mac 512K and the GUI environment was "ambitious" for the CPU of the day.
The Lisa doesn't have square pixels, so the canvas is scaled to be 1.5x as high as it is wide. This generally looks fine on high-dpi displays, because there's technically twice as much space to render with (pixels are 2px wide by 3px high). However, things will look distorted on a lower resolution display (where pixels are 1px wide by 1.5px high). That's just a compromise I made when designing this.
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."
How do you handle dynamic window/font scaling regardless of browser size (you get it for free with html mostly).
It's integer scaling; it involves changing the width, height, and style attributes of the canvas dynamically. I have a whole class that handles this, and let me tell you it took a lot of effort to get working properly and involved juggling around quite a few parameters, including the DPI, the border width, the pixel aspect ratio, and more. I had to use a ResizeObserver object to detect changes in the size of the DOM's body element.
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.
It treats any of my clicks as an attempt to select text, and draws everything with blue selection overlay (Firefox on Windows).
Otherwise, looks cool!
I've received several comments regarding the font - people are saying some of the character widths appear uneven. The font characters are literally bitmap fonts; each character is printed the same way every time, unless one or more styles is applied to it, but this is done in a consistent way. The Lisa's system font is also of a notably distinct style; the vertical parts of each letter are slightly wider than the horizontal parts to make up for the 2:3 pixel aspect ratio.
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.
In many ways, the Lisa is more sophisticated than our current GUIs. In particular, I liked the way applications meshed into the system and disappeared into stationery - if you want to create a document, double click on its corresponding stationery stack and a new document is created. No need to find open Excel (or LisaCalc).
IIRC, Windows 95 briefly had this in the form of a Templates folder. You added files to that folder and then you could create new copies of those files from the context menu. I don't remember it persisting into other versions of Windows.
macOS still supports turning any file into a template, a feature first introduced in System 7 back in 1991.
Just Get Info on any file in the Finder, then check the "Stationary pad" box.
Wow! That's amazing! Never realized it was still there.
The shadow text style and fatbits editor in the Preferences app really took me back. Other than a lack of close buttons on windows, it's remarkable that you can strip away 40 years of UX "innovation" and the result is still productive and intuitive.
(Edit: Menus staying open after one click was a welcome improvement that I think came much later.)
Yes, sticky menus arrived much later. I put the extra effort to add them here because everyone's so used to them now. Both options work - you can single-click to keep a menu open, or you can hold down the mouse and drag to open a menu which closes when you release the mouse.
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.
You can double-click on the icon in the top left corner of a window to close it. (Which, I guess, is just the shorthand for File > Set Aside.)
Yes.
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.
Just trying this out on iPhone on Firefox, and found something. If the phone is rotation locked in portrait mode (which mine normally is) I don't see buttons to install, try etc.
But if rotation lock is off, it's fine. Maybe there's something in the way the resolution is read that is different if the lock is on? Nothing appears in the menu bar at the top so there was no way to do anything.
Amazing efforts here though, now I can actually use it! Truly impressive.
The menu bar is hidden in the installer because that's how the Lisa's installer looked. I definitely need to do some work on layouts to make things more responsive. If your phone's screen is too small the text may overflow and things can get cut-off. But I don't want to cram scroll-able panes into all these dialogs because the Lisa didn't even do that.
I'm balancing historical accuracy with modern constraints with my own self-imposed technical debts, so there's bound to be compromises!
These are the kinds of show hn I live for. Tasty vanilla js + learning about an esoteric "Lisa GUI" well before my time. Bravo!
I would love to see a breakout style game or something in the demo/examples but that is my inner child speaking.
Thank you. That means a lot to me!
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...
This is pretty cool and it's surprising how well it works on mobile. I think the shuffle puzzle game has a bug where it can generate unsolvable puzzles. I ran into a parity issue. I solved it with the blank in the upper left but got no response from the game so I don't believe that was the intended solution.
Also checked with an online solver and it verified that there was no solution.
I haven't gone as far as verifying puzzles are solvable - right now I only verify the state of the puzzle is valid. Maybe in the future. For now I guess it will be like solitaire, where if you can't solve it you'll have to reshuffle it.
Incidentally, I'm planning on adding solitaire as the next game!
Oh nice. I don't actually know how to play solitaire, but I know Microsoft used the method of randomly generating them, solving them and then saving solvable seeds. (I believe they had 2 that weren't solvable somehow though so maybe it was a human solving them and it was a typo or mistake)
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.
I remember making that puzzle in C++.
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.
That's a good idea.
Great work, great memories on the Lisa.
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!
I spent so long fiddling with the puzzle game, trying to get a final 2 tiles swapped, just to find it was unsolvable sigh
Cool stuff though!
Same here, I spent forever on it :(
I never spent a lot of time using Lisa, but I got several opportunities to kick the tires as a Mac repair tech in the early 90s. I even fixed a Lisa or two, and converted one to a "Mac XL". You've captured the UI really nicely, and it was fun to click around. Good job!
I'm really happy you enjoyed it! The Lisa's a really cool machine; definitely easier to work with and service than some of Apple's other designs...
Very cool.
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.
Thanks. And yes, I did that! Under preferences, go to the touchscreen options panel, then enable trackpad mode!
That is surprisingly pleasant to use, actually!
Yes, one thumb on each side works great in landscape mode. Eventually I'll have to add some UI feedback to this mode when toggling it on or off, which shouldn't be too hard to do with a little CSS since the trackpad and button are just div elements overlaid on top of the canvas.
I don’t know if multi-tap functions are already spoken for, I’ve only played with this a little so far (great job btw!). I think being able to toggle Trackpad Mode with a three-finger tap would be a nice _touch_.
I'm on mobile so only able to try a couple things, but impressed with how responsive it is! Thanks for sharing
Thanks for looking!
Unfortunately it doesn’t work on my iPhone SE due to the small screen. I’ll have to upgrade my hardware if I want to use the latest OS I guess :)
That's definitely way too small! You should try it on a desktop or laptop.
Kind of an edge case here, but I love making 1-bit palettes and then testing them on old Apple UIs. This is just perfect. I hope you can make the color editable :)
I do have plans to eventually add a UI to add, edit, and remove custom color palette values... it's just a matter of coding up a dialog that lets you type in the RGB values and a label for each user-defined preset. I just haven't gotten around to it yet.
very cool, plus so much tasty design and functional tips that spark inspiration. I really love that look of aliased type that still reaches for that calligraphic look that's _just_ beyond the GUI's capacity to display. Nostalgia shmacking me in the taste buds with this one ...
Yes. The text styles were fun to do. They aren't implemented the same way QuickDraw does it, but it's close enough.
This brings back good memories, My first computer was Apple ][/e or /c clone (bulgarian Правец 8Ц), and then had a 286, later 386 PC with Hercules (monographics) monitor!
So I appreciate when things look really cool, reminds of me Think-Pascal.
Be sure to check out LisaGUI's "Windows 93™" theme which (aside from being a reference to the colors of that other great Web OS) is a Blue/Pink CGA-inspired theme, and the "Through the Looking Glass" icon theme which is literally just icons from Windows 1.x/2.x. (Although I had to make the recycle bin icon myself using the Win95 recycle symbol)
So I played the puzzle game on this Lisa and it appears unsolvable to me, which sort of surprised me. Has anyone else given it a shot?
Here's a picture of how far I got: https://imgur.com/a/QhnnC4X
If it is randomly generated, half of the puzzles are unsolvable.
Oh, it's totally solvable, but it's tricky! You kind of have to strategically "snake" the letters around a bit to sequentially place them in the right spots - you get less and less room to do so as you place more and more tiles.
Unfortunately it is not solvable. See this blog post on how to programmatically check for solvability:
https://datawookie.dev/blog/2019/04/sliding-puzzle-solvable/
Yeah, I was able to solve it
I never realized it, but I'd never even used an emulated Lisa - until today! Thanks for bringing life back to this old platform and letting us relive the thinking that led off the GUI. Cheers.
It's my pleasure. I am very happy you got some nostalgia out of it!
How did you research this? Do you own a Lisa?
Yes I do, a Lisa 2/10! LisaEm was also invaluable. Also, just a general obsession with vintage computers and UIs helped quite a bit!
There are Lisa emulators out there: https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Apple_Lisa_emul.... And you can find ROMs on macintoshrepository.org.
Love both the project and the landing page design. Thank you for creating this!!
Thanks! You might also appreciate the 404 page on the alpha subdomain! And whatever you do, do NOT try to open this with MS Internet Explorer! I can't imagine what might happen if you do that!
The font looks weird and uneven horizontally (some characters are "fatter" like if they were randomly bold). Is it supposed to look like that? Firefox + Windows.
Perhaps I'm doing something wrong, but the line widths in the characters are quite inconsistent. For example the two l's in "install" have different widths. This makes something pretty amazing look slightly disappointing.
(Tested in Firefox and Chrome on desktop.)
I'll take a closer look at this. Might be a kerning issue.
EDIT: I'm honestly not sure what this issue might be... If you're up for sending me a screenshot, there's an email link at the bottom of https://yaros.ae/.
Looks great! I love the choice to make it consistent across browsers through canvas rendering. Cool that it's a PWA.
What's up with the clock? Mine was two minutes off of local system time.
The clock is not entirely bug-free and has been a bit of a victim of my impulse towards premature optimization. I've rewrote it once and I'm considering rewriting it again... so it's not just you. It should hopefully work properly if you reload the page.
Here it was "on time" except it apparently uses round(), so 30 seconds past the minute it would show the next minute.
For some reason I never seem to encounter bugs like this myself! I guess I'll have to do another rewrite of that. Was it just the menu clock? Did the clock app exhibit the same behavior?
Boy do I know that feeling :D
I didn't look at the menu clock, only the clock app.
Real cool project tho, kudos!
This is amazing! Thanks for the excellent memories!
Thank you! I'm happy you enjoyed it!
Is keyboard not supposed to work? E.g. tabbing through the widgets.
The Lisa doesn't have an alt-tab function for Window management, so I haven't added one. Also, it would be difficult to use those keys in particular because it would conflict with your system's alt+tab keyboard shortcut.
When you select text in a textbox, the keyboard should input text. Also, individual menu items have their own keyboard shortcuts. If you're on a PC, it defaults to using the Control key as the "Apple" key. If your on a Mac, it defaults to using the Command key. This option can be changed in the preferences app in the "Set Conveniences" pane.
I don't mean Alt+Tab, just Tab by itself to move focus through the widgets in the current window. I don't know how it's supposed to work on Lisa, but pretty much every TUI or GUI I've seen from early 90s onwards had full keyboard navigation support like that.
Just clicking around I accidentally highlighted the background element or something, which caused the whole page to turn blue. Then no matter what I clicked I couldn't get it to un-select. Making everything blue didn't ruin the experience or anything but it was a little annoying. Safari 18.5 (20621.2.5.11.8) and Google Chrome 138.0.7204.93.
I had the same reaction, but it's intentional. Open the Preferences app, check Decorate Desktop, and then select something other than Pale Blue Dot from the color palette picker.
Unless the canvas element itself is being selected - which would be a big oversight on my part, that's the default color palette, which is a blue tint to mimic the Lisa's CRT. Right now, it isn't applied until the settings start loading.
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.
I think you and other commenters are correct - it's just the theming. I can't get it to not have the tint on startup and it goes away when changing the theme as rgovostes described. The reason I was confused was because it starts out as black-and-white and then turns blue, and the blue is basically the same color as selecting text! Oh well, I feel silly now.
Yeah. This is part of why I wanted to get this on places like HN eventually. This is valuable user feedback! For the longest time I kept this project totally secret.
What I'll probably do is serialize the setting data to localstorage so it's available before the system starts up and loads from IndexedDB.
Same on iphone. Maybe a swipe or something and it selected the whole page blue
Edit: doing nothing will do the autoselect. Odd
I think that tint is intended to emulate the look of the Lisa CRT.
Yes, that's correct. There's a variety of palettes to choose from in the preferences!
would love to see the source code for this, poked around but couldn't find anything :-)
It's not open source right now... maybe someday, but not right now. :)
Amazing turn on/off effect!
Thanks! I put a lot of effort into making sure it was just right. The delay right after shutdown before the button panel shows up where you see absolutely nothing before noticing your own reflection in the blackness of your screen was also intentional!
amazing how fast and snappy this UI is, even though it is running inside a browser.
Wow this is mega cool!
Thanks! <3
Crazy cool, wow!
Thank you!
Very cool.
Thank you!
On the original Mac, the menu bar drop downs didn't stay open if you just clicked on the title. You had to keep the mouse button down, highlight the menu item then let go to activate. Not sure if that is how the Lisa worked.
This is awesome. It's actually pretty quick. Major kudos.
Thank you! Although just between you and me, it really depends on the speed of your computer and whatever JS engine you're using. If you open up the bounce demo and start increasing the number of objects on screen, you'll find the FPS dips quite a bit. Also, scrolling through a multi-page text document may also slow things down..... just don't tell anyone! ;)
very cool!
<3 <3 <3
Cool but color hurt my eyes.
In the preferences app, you can set the brightness after clicking "Set Conveniences," and you can change the color palette after clicking "Decorate Desktop." You may have to play around a little to find a setting that is most comfortable to you.
> Author's note: I pronounce the letters in GUI separately. Why would you ever pronounce it "gooey?" Please don't do that. Just don't.
Solidarity!
We should pronounce all acronyms/initialisms.
TUI = tooey
CLI = clee
TCP/IP = tickipip
GPT = gipity
DNS = dunce
HTTP = Hittup
USB = Oosbuh
USB-C = Oosbuhc
My favorite is my friend’s pronunciation of “LGBTQIA”, or “littebittiqua”. Also, I’m definitely gonna start using “dunce” and “Oosbuh”, but stick with “USB C”
> GPT = gipity
I'm calling foul on that one. It's "Jay pay tay". Which sounds the same as the French phrase "J'ai pété" or "I farted."
That makes me laugh more than gipity.
This is pure evil
...because fighting about silly things that are just fun to poke each other about is much more fun than fighting about things like politics in this day and age...
vi versus emacs, vi versus vim, (guh sound)IF versus (j sound)IF, m68k versus x86, Mac versus Amiga, BSD versus Linux, et cetera.
Yes, I know right! Imagine what kind of beautiful world we could live in if we spent trillions of dollars on this instead of the military industrial complex!
Where I grew up, in the 80s, it was a toss between a mouse and trackball for people. Same sort of arguments.
I kind of like both.
Thankfully someone agrees with me!
Initialisms are just that!
Otherwise, how can you tell snmp from sntp from smtp!
There! Are! Dozens! Of! Us!
(actually there's a shit ton of us who learned computers via text and pronounce things correctly)
YES
> minor bugs with PWAs on iOS
There are major bugs with PWA's, and I suspect most of them stem from the tens of billions of dollars per year of app store revenue that would be undermined if PWA's actually became useful...
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44483280.
Well, yeah... of course. Thankfully, mobile support hasn't been the highest priority.
Users aren’t demanding and have never demanded good PWA support. I suspect it has more to do with that.
Random people have no business of knowing what a “PWA” is. So of course they don’t ask specifically for that.
People asking for “I just want to have fully featured apps coming from wherever” are aplenty. Apple has pushed app snippets and in-AppStore one shot apps for a long time. These would be much better as PWAs.
Not because PWAs are inherently better. I believe native programs are superior. However history has shown that vast majority of apps are just poorly wrapped websites.
As an aside, iOS PWA support is really phoned in. For example they introduced environmental css variables for safe insets. And then provided no way to test them outside of real device or a simulator.
I’d bet they would if they were offered a nearly 30% price reduction.
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