- 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."
by rustystump
1 subcomments
- 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.
- 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.
by rgovostes
2 subcomments
- 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.)
by hoistbypetard
1 subcomments
- 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!
by jonathanlydall
1 subcomments
- 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.
- 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.
by subjectsigma
4 subcomments
- 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.
by djaychela
2 subcomments
- 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.
by MarkusWandel
0 subcomment
- 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.
by mysterydip
1 subcomments
- I'm on mobile so only able to try a couple things, but impressed with how responsive it is! Thanks for sharing
by cruffle_duffle
1 subcomments
- The FPS display needs a way to be disabled. It rapidly “flickers” between several values on my iPhone due to what I’d assume is rounding or something. It’s a very annoying distraction from what otherwise looks pretty cool.
- 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.
- 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.
by fitsumbelay
1 subcomments
- 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 ...
- 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 :)
- 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
- 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.
- Took me a minute to figure out how to close a window. (Had to remember it's the same way as closing a window in Win 3.1) I even scrolled through the help document and didn't see it.
by hackyhacky
2 subcomments
- How did you research this? Do you own a Lisa?
- It looks good in a maximized window on an external retina display on my MBP.
One thing, though, is that it "stutters" every 15 seconds or so. Like, it pauses for a noticeable time, like hundreds of ms. The UI shows a consistent 119-120 FPS, even when this is happening.
It's possible the fault is Firefox, and not your page. I do have 64 GB of RAM, but also a zillion tabs open.
- 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 wonder the extent on what could be accomplished of work on a system like this in modern computer capacity. Your work inspire many thoughts like these. Nice accomplishment.
- Why does the screen turn light blue like it's highlighted text a few seconds after the page loads? Firefox on Mac OS.
- Please add Frotz to this, so we can play text adventures. Amazingly, well done!
- The mouse actually works quite well with trackpad mode disabled. I’m using an iPhone Mini. One trick: To select a menu option tap-and-hold a menu title then drag to an option and let go to select.
Really cool!
- 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.)
by russellbeattie
0 subcomment
- 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.
- Love both the project and the landing page design. Thank you for creating this!!
- 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.
by demetrius
1 subcomments
- 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!
- Aesthetically perfect, great job.
- This is amazing! Thanks for the excellent memories!
by DustinBrett
0 subcomment
- Looks great! I love the choice to make it consistent across browsers through canvas rendering. Cool that it's a PWA.
by reconnecting
1 subcomments
- Amazing turn on/off effect!
- What's up with the clock? Mine was two minutes off of local system time.
- Is keyboard not supposed to work? E.g. tabbing through the widgets.
by zahirbmirza
0 subcomment
- I miss those "extra" icons mac used to have.
- hmmm
https://i.imgur.com/uVpcRPz.png
- Wow this is mega cool!
- Crazy cool, wow!
- would love to see the source code for this, poked around but couldn't find anything :-)
by em3rgent0rdr
0 subcomment
- amazing how fast and snappy this UI is, even though it is running inside a browser.
- Cool but color hurt my eyes.
- Very cool.
- Its awesome.
- This is awesome. It's actually pretty quick. Major kudos.
- very cool!
- > 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!
by londons_explore
4 subcomments
- > 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...
by andy_nguyen
0 subcomment
- [flagged]
by iluvfossilfuels
0 subcomment
- [flagged]
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