xen0byte / ui95

🖥 WIP: A preact implementation of Windows 95/98/ME style components and apps. See it in action on my personal site at https://ash.ms

A preact implementation of Windows 95/98 style components and apps. It's a very specific implementation, and probably isn't suitable for your use case.

👉 Read the docs 👉

Developing

There are three separate projects:

1. Storybook for component development (npm start)
2. Docs (npm run watch-docs)
3. Example app (npm run watch-example)

The final build is automated by npm run build when deployed to Netlify.

Lessons learned

1. React isn't super great for realtime apps. Window management in particular is handled directly in DOM to prevent windows rerendering on every mouse move.
2. This took a fair while to implement, and toward the end I got a little lazy with prop drilling. Windows have far too many dependencies and could benefit from a simpler API.