38 comments

  • ayaros 10 hours ago
    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."

    • ivape 7 hours ago
      How do you handle dynamic window/font scaling regardless of browser size (you get it for free with html mostly).
      • ayaros 6 hours ago
        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.

  • ayaros 3 hours ago
    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.

  • rgovostes 10 hours ago
    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.)

    • ayaros 9 hours ago
      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.

    • layer8 10 hours ago
      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.)
      • ayaros 10 hours ago
        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.

  • muzani 50 minutes ago
    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 :)
  • rustystump 7 hours ago
    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.

    • ayaros 7 hours ago
      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...

  • hoistbypetard 6 hours ago
    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!
    • ayaros 3 hours ago
      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...
  • Cieric 8 hours ago
    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.

    • ayaros 8 hours ago
      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!

      • Cieric 7 hours ago
        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.

      • pedroslopez 1 hour ago
        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!

      • BubbleRings 6 hours ago
        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!

      • Shorel 7 hours ago
        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.

        • ayaros 7 hours ago
          That's a good idea.
  • jonathanlydall 9 hours ago
    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.

    • ayaros 9 hours ago
      Thanks. And yes, I did that! Under preferences, go to the touchscreen options panel, then enable trackpad mode!
      • john-aj 7 hours ago
        That is surprisingly pleasant to use, actually!
        • ayaros 7 hours ago
          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.
          • phatskat 4 hours ago
            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_.
  • mysterydip 11 hours ago
    I'm on mobile so only able to try a couple things, but impressed with how responsive it is! Thanks for sharing
    • ayaros 9 hours ago
      Thanks for looking!
  • malkia 5 hours ago
    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.

    • ayaros 4 hours ago
      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)
  • fitsumbelay 10 hours ago
    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 ...
    • ayaros 9 hours ago
      Yes. The text styles were fun to do. They aren't implemented the same way QuickDraw does it, but it's close enough.
  • leakycap 6 hours ago
    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.
    • ayaros 3 hours ago
      It's my pleasure. I am very happy you got some nostalgia out of it!
  • sfblah 8 hours ago
    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

    • Shorel 7 hours ago
      If it is randomly generated, half of the puzzles are unsolvable.
    • ayaros 8 hours ago
      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.
    • phyzix5761 8 hours ago
      Yeah, I was able to solve it
  • shusaku 6 hours ago
    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 :)
    • ayaros 4 hours ago
      That's definitely way too small! You should try it on a desktop or laptop.
  • hackyhacky 10 hours ago
    How did you research this? Do you own a Lisa?
  • spagoop 1 hour ago
    would love to see the source code for this, poked around but couldn't find anything :-)
  • DigiEggz 6 hours ago
    Love both the project and the landing page design. Thank you for creating this!!
    • ayaros 4 hours ago
      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!
  • kaoD 6 hours ago
    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.
  • ceautery 4 hours ago
    What's up with the clock? Mine was two minutes off of local system time.
    • ayaros 4 hours ago
      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.
    • magicalhippo 4 hours ago
      Here it was "on time" except it apparently uses round(), so 30 seconds past the minute it would show the next minute.
      • ayaros 3 hours ago
        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?
  • DustinBrett 6 hours ago
    Looks great! I love the choice to make it consistent across browsers through canvas rendering. Cool that it's a PWA.
  • smokel 11 hours ago
    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.)

    • ayaros 10 hours ago
      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/.

  • int_19h 4 hours ago
    Is keyboard not supposed to work? E.g. tabbing through the widgets.
    • ayaros 4 hours ago
      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.

      • int_19h 58 minutes ago
        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.
  • em3rgent0rdr 3 hours ago
    amazing how fast and snappy this UI is, even though it is running inside a browser.
  • JSR_FDED 10 hours ago
    This is amazing! Thanks for the excellent memories!
    • ayaros 9 hours ago
      Thank you! I'm happy you enjoyed it!
  • subjectsigma 11 hours ago
    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.
    • rgovostes 10 hours ago
      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.
    • ayaros 10 hours ago
      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.

      • subjectsigma 8 hours ago
        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.
        • ayaros 8 hours ago
          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.

    • humptybumpty 11 hours ago
      Same on iphone. Maybe a swipe or something and it selected the whole page blue

      Edit: doing nothing will do the autoselect. Odd

    • pvg 11 hours ago
      I think that tint is intended to emulate the look of the Lisa CRT.
      • ayaros 10 hours ago
        Yes, that's correct. There's a variety of palettes to choose from in the preferences!
  • reconnecting 10 hours ago
    Amazing turn on/off effect!
    • ayaros 10 hours ago
      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!
  • FerkiHN 10 hours ago
    Wow this is mega cool!
  • russellbeattie 3 hours ago
    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.
  • ckrapu 7 hours ago
    Very cool.
  • Jonovono 11 hours ago
    Crazy cool, wow!
  • ww520 5 hours ago
    This is awesome. It's actually pretty quick. Major kudos.
    • ayaros 4 hours ago
      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! ;)
  • g_host56 8 hours ago
    very cool!
  • revskill 10 hours ago
    Cool but color hurt my eyes.
    • ayaros 10 hours ago
      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.
  • Avshalom 9 hours ago
    > 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!

    • wpm 7 hours ago
      We should pronounce all acronyms/initialisms.

      TUI = tooey

      CLI = clee

      TCP/IP = tickipip

      GPT = gipity

      DNS = dunce

      HTTP = Hittup

      USB = Oosbuh

      USB-C = Oosbuhc

      • phatskat 4 hours ago
        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”
      • hoistbypetard 6 hours ago
        > 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.

      • ayaros 7 hours ago
        This is pure evil
    • johnklos 9 hours ago
      ...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.

      • ayaros 8 hours ago
        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!
      • bbarnett 7 hours ago
        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.

    • ayaros 8 hours ago
      Thankfully someone agrees with me!
      • bbarnett 7 hours ago
        Initialisms are just that!

        Otherwise, how can you tell snmp from sntp from smtp!

      • Avshalom 7 hours ago
        There! Are! Dozens! Of! Us!

        (actually there's a shit ton of us who learned computers via text and pronounce things correctly)

  • londons_explore 10 hours ago
    > 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...

    • dang 9 hours ago
      We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44483280.
    • ayaros 10 hours ago
      Well, yeah... of course. Thankfully, mobile support hasn't been the highest priority.
    • frumplestlatz 10 hours ago
      Users aren’t demanding and have never demanded good PWA support. I suspect it has more to do with that.
      • yoz-y 9 hours ago
        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.

      • slivanes 9 hours ago
        I’d bet they would if they were offered a nearly 30% price reduction.
  • iluvfossilfuels 10 hours ago
    [flagged]
  • andy_nguyen 50 minutes ago
    [flagged]