A simple simulation of a desktop environment, built using React.
While it's somewhat functional, it's still a work in progress. Expect things to change fairly often, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.
The purpose of this app, as with most of my apps, is for fun and practice. It doesn't really serve any useful purpose. It's fun to work on, and hopefully you find it interesting in some way, either to work on (feel free to get involved) or just play around with.
There's no defined scope. It's something that will likely slowly be built up more and more over time. With that being said, there are at least a few things that are definitely out of scope:
- Installing applications
You will never be able to install applications into this desktop simulator. You can build your own applications using React and add them to the repo, but you will never be able to install any genuine applications.
There's a basic file system built into the desktop environment, and it's persisted in your browsers local storage. It's not a full file system, so it doesn't contain the typical system files and folders you'd expect to see in a Windows, Linux or Mac OS system, but it's enough for you to create files and folders as required.
You can position your applications anywhere on the desktop, resizing them to fit your requirements. You can also minimize and maximize files as required.
There's no point having a file system built int the environment if there's no GUI to use it! There's a basic file browser application that allows you to navigate throughout the file system, view and create files and folders, pin favorites, and more.
Of course, there's a simple calculator app that allows you to perform basic calculations. Don't expect anything fancy though; you wont be able to complete you're algebra homework using it!
A very bog-standard notes app that allows you to... well, write notes! It doesn't currently support saving files, but that should be added in the near future (the file system supports it, there's just no option in the UI to actually save the file). The same goes for loading saved files.
The settings application is for viewing and modifying various settings of the desktop environment. At present, this is limited to:
You can control the appearance of your simulated desktop environment, changing things like:
- Background image
- UI main color
- UI accent color
- Font color
- Simple icon color
Hopefully the list of configurable appearance settings will continue to grow over time.