Canvas UI Library Demo

http://mochaui.com/demo/

by skenney26 • 18 years ago

54 23 18 years ago

mochaui.com

jasonlbaptiste• 18 years ago

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

DougBTX4• 18 years ago

MDI interfaces are so last century...

ashu• 18 years ago

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

DougBTX4• 18 years ago

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

j2d2• 18 years ago

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.

DougBTX4• 18 years ago

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".

mattdennewitz• 18 years ago

very slick

KirinDave• 18 years ago

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

babul• 18 years ago

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

axod2• 18 years ago

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.

palish• 18 years ago

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.

axod2• 18 years ago

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.

tipjoy• 18 years ago

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.

neilk• 18 years ago

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?

ph0rque• 18 years ago

can anyone tell if it works on ie6?

spydez• 18 years ago

It works in IE6.

benbeltran2• 18 years ago

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.

dhotson2• 18 years ago

Have you ever used meebo?

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

benbeltran2• 18 years ago

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...

LogicHoleFlaw• 18 years ago

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.

PieSquared• 18 years ago

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.

DougBTX4• 18 years ago

> 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.

Canvas UI Library Demo

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