Canvas UI Library Demo | Hacker News Reader

Canvas UI Library Demo

mochaui.com

54 pointsskenney2623 comments

I'm still not convinced that conventional windows work inside a browser. I think it confuses the user, and makes for bloat and mess.

Yeah it's cool you can do things like emulating desktop windows, resize, drag, minimize etc, but just because you can do this, doesn't mean you should.

There's a lot to be said for keeping things clean and simple. Keep things accessible.

Also keep in mind that your users may be viewing your webpage with their phone, which is one big reason to not go the desktop simulation route.

Still, it's a very cool demo.

Agreed. I have had users suggest I use right click to open up a contextual menu on my webapp... All well and good until you're using an iPhone, or wii, or something else without a mouse.

You can't make a blanket statement about whether this is good or bad; it's a tool - it depends on how it's used.

I don't think the whole "Desktop in the Web UI" fad is good for the web.

A lot of apps that are used in the desktop could be easily ported to the web without the need of windows like this. There are other ways to do it, AJAX allows for them.

What works in the desktop doesn't necessarilly work in the web.

I agree. It seems like a lot of these web-desktop UI libraries are just reinventing X11, poorly. The web has its own tropes and idioms. The availability of performant and standards-compliant Javascript is changing what's possible, but that doesn't mean we need to just reimplement the previous paradigm.

Have you ever used meebo?

It's one case where I think the metaphor works quite well.

Actually you're right about meebo. But I've used several other "Desktop on the web" websites or sites that use this paradigm and generally I think there must be another way because that doesn't really work for me.

Now imagine if those kinds of idea of decentralization were used in a modern OS for certain configurations and stuff...

I don't quite follow.. what do you mean by decentralization?

.. do you mean something like having your desktop settings on a central server? ..something like apple's new Mobile Me?

Awesomesauce. Though I agree the world should move away from windows in the browser, frameworks like this are great too. The tabs and so on are slick.

Edit: hey, it works in IE! I guess this is Canvas.IE? Is the author on news.yc?

can anyone tell if it works on ie6?

It works in IE6.

That was awesome! I never believed the idea that actual applications, like work processing or something like that, could shift away from the desktop, but now I think that it actually might be possible.

I was literally open-jawed when I created a new window with the content URL of http://www.google.com, used that to search for Mocha UI, then opened another instance of Mocha UI in itself. I thought that was pretty nifty. Although useless in practice.

> Although useless in practice.

A good point. Also notable that Mocha UI did not invent the iframe, nor use it in any way unforeseen by it's inventors.

I can see a lot of use for this in monitoring frameworks and admin interfaces.

or porting desktop app interfaces to the web to save having to retrain users in business environments.

pretty interesting. seen tons of libraries do stuff like this, but if you can have it:

a) well documented b) with good performance c) easily extendable

people will use it to make very desktopy like web apps ala gho.st etc

MDI interfaces are so last century...

You use stuff when it's relevant and applicable and not by applying various "century" flags.

Reinventing past mistakes in new mediums does not count as innovation.

Fair point. I'm not sure how I'd feel about it being entirely pop-up window based, which I presume is the alternative to MDI.

There is no need for pop-up windows nor MDI, it's a technical demo for the sake of a technical demo. It's no accident that the default layout contains no overlapping "windows".

very slick

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