This reminds me of a time circa 2005 where "Sub OSes" were somewhat popular in the GameMaker community. Seems that given enough time someone will try to make an OS-like interface in a given game engine.
It was a great way to understand UI and usability paradigms beyond building game mechanics.
This definitely triggered some pleasant nostalgia for me.
Mannnnn the nostalgia. I loved programs like this and Sub7c my favorite was DivineIntervention 3 I just liked the interface and thought the name was cool lol. I’d love to see what all the devs of these things are up to today. Pri$m, if you’re out there let it be known that your work on DI3 is what got me into programming!
He has some good ones, my favorites though are the ones that run in <64k of memory. In particular the Apple ][ desktop http://toastytech.com/guis/a2desk.html, which he comments on finding on a IIGS, but in reality it would run on the IIe and IIc as well. Although, it qualifies more as a "launcher" than a GUI/desktop because outside of the apps it comes with I don't think anyone every wrote anything for it. Meaning all its apps were just normal 8bit prodos applications that took over the whole machine. Given the timeframe though, the mac didn't have the multifinder until system 6 a couple years later.
(whats pretty scary is that I've run (or at least booted) nearly all of them, all the apple and x86/PC ones for sure, plus quite a number of the others). GEOS was pretty cool too.
That's so cool. There's a few old programs I'd love to see but since it's been over 30 years I can't recall their names.
- A music composer that took advantage of the MIDI ports. Connecting the software to synths etc would allow the Atari ST to not only control the synth, but also to record the music in note form as it was played.
- A BASIC interpreting environment. Noteworthy for no reason other than this was the place where I wrote my first program ever.
- A desktop publishing application with similar functions to the early Pagemaker.
I like to boot up old operating systems for UI design inspiration. Software really felt different back then. This sort of “pointless” project saves me a lot of hassle!
NSIS (created also by Nullsoft) was particularly awesome, made it a breeze to build a Windows installer. There was also a photo gallery script Justin created which I thought was ahead of its time back then.
The Qbasic GUI community was super tight knit back in 2005ish.
Classic hangouts at jacobpalm.dk, reviews by Todd Seuss at Data Components.
Halcyon days.
I got my start writing one of the guis that was reviewed by MystikShadows on Pete's QB Site... Making things appear on the screen was so exciting. Now I kinda do the same thing, but with Jetpack Compose in the automotive space.
Oh what a trip down memory lane. Software of that era had really interesting UI and UX. I made a winamp skin that was a blob (of my face, or perhaps my dad's) after using Kai's Power Goo.
I was the creator of Tiagix OS, AFAIK one of the first subOSes that actually had support for creating apps for it.
Learned a lot about GUI toolkits making it, since I had to implement one from scratch for it.
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