make-of · midnight 2000

A Y2K desktop where every app actually works

Fake operating systems are a classic web toy, but the apps are usually screenshots. Here they are real: the paint program paints, the tracker synthesizes sound live, the notepad still has your note tomorrow, and the browser browses a tiny fictional internet.

What it demonstrates

State, persistence, and audio synthesis in one dependency-free file. The page implements a miniature window manager — dragging, focus order, minimize, a taskbar, a start menu — and then four working applications on top of it, in about 500 lines of JavaScript.

The techniques, honestly named

• Millennium chrome — the beveled 3-D look is two pairs of inset box-shadow highlights, exactly how late-90s toolkits shaded their widgets. Pressed states just swap the light and dark edges.
• Window manager — each window is a role="dialog" section; title-bar dragging uses pointer capture; focus raises z-index from a counter; the taskbar keeps one toggle button per open window.
• PixelPad — a canvas at twice its logical resolution for crisp lines, pointer events with capture for reliable strokes, and a save button that exports a real PNG via toDataURL.
• BeepTracker — no audio files. Two tunes are arrays of MIDI note numbers; a lookahead scheduler feeds square-wave lead, triangle bass, and filtered-noise hats to the Web Audio API. Nothing plays before you press play, and the stop button is always in reach.
• Jotter 2000 — a plain textarea saved to localStorage on a short debounce, with a status line that tells the truth about where the data lives.
• NetComet — the "browser" renders three built-in fictional pages from template strings, with a working back stack and address bar. The GeoCities-style page gets its marquee and blink back via small CSS keyframes.
• Mobile — under 640 px the windows become one-at-a-time full-width sheets and dragging is disabled; the taskbar and start menu stay.

Recreate it

The full recreation prompt — the complete art direction, window-manager spec, all four apps, and the quality bar — is in the showroom vault.

Prompt — $5, on the dashboard