@aladdin

Devlog #5 | LampOS
Morning everyone!
I added a settings app, which honestly should’ve existed a while ago. It’s got the same sidebar pattern as notes and files (categories on the left, content on the right), split into four sections: appearance, clock, system, and about.
Appearance is the fun one — dark/light mode toggle, five accent color swatches, and four wallpaper presets (dots, linen, stripes, plain). Flipping any of these updates the CSS variables on the body in real time, so the whole OS re-themes itself instantly without touching every individual app’s styles. That’s the payoff of building everything off CSS variables from day one — paid off here more than I expected.
Clock lets you switch between 12-hour and 24-hour format for the topbar clock. System shows live uptime, storage used, and counts for notes/files/events — basically a tiny dashboard pulling from the same localStorage keys the other apps already write to. Threw in a reset-all-data button too, gated behind a confirm so nobody nukes their notes by accident.
About is just the boring but necessary stuff — version number, a short blurb, link to say hi.
Everything saves to one new localStorage key (lamposSettings) and gets applied on boot, so preferences persist across reloads.
Ran into a small bug right after shipping it — the clock format toggle was saving correctly, but the clock display itself was reading from a key that didn’t exist, so 24-hour mode silently never worked. Classic “wrote the setter, forgot the getter wasn’t hooked up” moment. Fixed now.
Next up: still want to wire notes into the file manager like I said last time. Settings kind of jumped the queue because it felt like a quick win, but that’s still the bigger structural thing on my list.
Thanks for stopping by!

Devlog #4 | LampOS
Alright, back at it!
Today’s focus was two bigger systems: a file manager and a calendar.
The file manager was the one I was most excited about. Folders on the left, files on the right, all stored in localStorage. You can create folders, create files inside them, rename, delete — basic but functional. The idea is eventually other apps (notes especially) can plug into this same storage system instead of having their own separate localStorage key, so everything in the OS lives in one place. Not there yet, but the foundation’s built.
The calendar came together pretty cleanly after the file manager groundwork. Monthly grid view, click a date to see/add events, little dot indicator on days that have events. Had to get the date math right for the first-day offset so the grid lines up correctly with the right day of the week, that took a couple tries.
Both apps follow the same folder/sidebar pattern as notes and movies at this point, so the OS is starting to feel a lot more cohesive instead of just a bunch of separate apps bolted together.
Tomorrow I think I want to actually wire notes into the file manager like I mentioned, so they share the same underlying storage instead of being two separate systems.
Thanks for stopping by!

Devlog #3 | LampOS
Evening all!
Big one today. Added three things: an AI chatbot (lampai), a notes app, and a calculator.
The notes app was straightforward — sidebar list of notes, click to edit, autosaves to localStorage as you type. Added a little “saved” indicator that fades in and out so there’s some feedback when it’s actually persisting.
The calculator was fun, just standard four-function stuff with a clean grid layout. Took a bit to get the +/- and % logic right but nothing major.
The chatbot, though. That was a whole journey. Wanted lampai to feel like a small AI living inside the OS, not just a generic chat widget. Getting the API connection working took way longer than expected — kept hitting CORS issues trying to call the API directly from the browser, which makes sense in hindsight since you can’t expose an API key client-side. Ended up setting up a Cloudflare Worker as a proxy so the key stays server-side and the frontend just talks to my worker URL instead. A few false starts along the way (typos in the worker code, wrong response parsing, the usual) but got it stable by the end of the night.
Now lampai actually responds and keeps conversation history during the session. Feels like the OS has a little bit of life in it now.
Thanks for stopping by!

Devlog #2 | LampOS
Hey, hope everyone’s doing well!
First real apps today. Started with a contact page since it felt like the easiest win — just a little card with email, discord, and instagram, click any row to copy it to clipboard. Simple, but satisfying to see it work.
Then I built out the movies section, which ended up being more fun than I expected. Sidebar with a list of movies, click one and it loads the details on the right — title, year, rating, my thoughts on it. Right now it’s just hardcoded data (Spirited Away, Grand Budapest Hotel, Whiplash), but the structure is there to make it dynamic later if I want.
Ran into a small CSS issue where the sidebar entries weren’t highlighting correctly when active — turned out I had a typo, movies-entry instead of movie-entry in one spot. Classic. Caught it eventually.
Feels good having actual content in the OS now instead of just an empty shell. Next up I want to add something more interactive.
Thanks for stopping by!

Devlog #1 | LampOS

What’s good everyone!

Today was mostly about getting LampOS off the ground. I followed a setup guide to get the basic shell working — windows, dragging, the boot screen, all that. Nothing too crazy, but it’s the kind of foundational stuff that everything else depends on, so I wanted to get it right before building on top of it.

The window dragging took a minute to get smooth. My first pass had the windows jittering whenever you moved the mouse too fast, turns out I was tracking the delta wrong. Fixed it by recalculating initialX and initialY on every mousemove instead of just once at the start.

I also added the little boot animation with the logo and progress bar, mostly because it felt right for something calling itself an “OS.” Small detail but it makes the whole thing feel more like a real product and less like a webpage.

By the end of the day I had a working desktop with draggable windows, a topbar with a live clock, and basically nothing else — but it was a real foundation. Tomorrow I want to start adding actual apps.

Thanks for stopping by!