Q/A

Questions and answers for P4/4K

What is this?

It's my experimental web-desktop that only contains windows management functions and provides program interface allowing communicating with other apps and use web-desktop features. Its apps are webpages that use JS library to communicate with P4, and which can be hosted almost anywhere in web.

You can think of it as of browser, which open webpages and gives them way to communicate easily with other tabs or access to browser's global context. For example, there can be some app that provides interface to some persistent storage and all apps can use it via P4.

How to use it?

Click on buttons in launcher to start "applets" or enter its URL (if you know it) and press Enter. Move windows dragging by header, double-click on header to maximize, right-click - to hide/minimize, Ctrl + click - to close window.

Is this real webtop?

Well, on the one hand, it's not like real web desktop services, that were around some years ago. Yes, it's about mimicking desktop UI and applications, but it doesn't have backend, any "native" apps for now and don't do any heavyweight stuff on server, it isn't service by itself. On the other hand, my plan is not to fall into "toy" web desktops (at least not totally) which are mostly about creating copycat of desktop UI and aren't much useful, although not completely useless as well. Utility + concept > game + authenticity.

Why have you started it?

Well, initially this started as one of must-have things for web-developer - page that acts like window manager. There was also a bit of challenge as I tried to fit in 4 kbytes (hence the original name). So, it was just "toy" page that can create floating iframes, and I've even forgot about it.

Later, I've came across this demo again, i've decided to fix code and renew it. And as openning regular websites isn't practical anymore and sometimes even not possible, I've decided to check idea of special pages that are acts like applications (well, it's not something that fresh) and communicate (using iframe communication APIs) via some protocol to "host" page (for something like syscalls and kinda shared storage) and another "app" pages. So it have to be hub for small apps, that can be distributed across web, with some batteries included.

What can I do here?

How to do applications/games for it?

Is it developing?