Today I just started putting my foundation for the WebOS. I made a list of two to-do things and I developed the five apps that I want:
Cyber Explorer, which is going to be like Google Chrome but only for the cybersecurity-related topics.
The cryptography app, which is used for encryption.
The decryption app, which is used for decryption.
The notes app, which is just like notes.
I’m going to be writing the encryption and decryption programs manually in the future because I really enjoy it. I think I’m going to do some Caesar’s cipher and other things.
For the background I want to have a radar kind of animation but for now I just used a gradient. The main things I researched or did today were the overall HTML structure. The apps don’t actually work right now, which are just div placeholders for all the windows and apps. I will worry less about them functioning later.
Now for the big part, the visual style, I thought of an animation for each of the texts. When text appears I want to have this animation that grabs an array, which is just the text, and stores it in memory in the program in a variable. It then checks for the length and the used letters and moves the letters that are already used from the scrambling letters.
In the example that I use, hello, we can’t use the letters H, E, L, N, O, or scrambling. We make some frames for the animation, printing each character by character. For example for hello we use H, then H, then H, then E, then L, and then H, E, L, and H, E, L, L. We are using the React library in JavaScript.
For the second part of the animation we just make five frames with a bunch of scrambling gibberish without the letters that were overused and we just implement them one by one. Each of the characters is replacing each of the frames of the scrambling. That way we have an animation. I haven’t implemented it yet but I hope to implement it in a future devlog. There is a picture showing the logic of the animation. I thought it was better than to show the code.
I also investigated some cool loading animations for the start of WebOS and I made a loaded screen with this animation, which is just a library with particle animations. I made the overall first HTML and I included some calendar and timer.
For development, I used Claude Code mainly to help fix bugs, clean up typos, and integrate some of the JavaScript components, especially the loading screen. I wrote the initial HTML structure myself, but once everything was in place, Claude Code helped me resolve integration issues and speed up the debugging process.Overall, today was mostly about building the foundation of the project. The desktop is still very early, but I now have the basic structure, a clear plan for the applications, and several UI ideas that I’ll continue implementing in future devlogs.
I’m genuinely excited because I spent so much time in the animation that I haven’t even implemented yet :(