A new desktop app whose whole point is to say sorry, and to look like
saying it took effort. Nothing in it is a static bitmap.
The heart is the classic parametric heart curve, x = 16sin^3(t) and
y = 13cos(t) - 5cos(2t) - 2cos(3t) - cos(4t), precomputed as a 96-point
integer polygon normalised to a half-width of 1000 and scanline-filled at
whatever size the beat currently has it at. Even-odd crossing counting is
what keeps the notch between the lobes open. The beat is a two-thump
cardiac envelope -- a strong systolic beat and a softer echo -- and the
fill carries a vertical gradient, a soft specular highlight on the upper
lobe, and a six-layer glow. The kernel is built -mno-sse with no floating
point, so every curve, gradient, easing and physics step is integer-only
and needs no trigonometry at runtime.
Around it: three apology letters that type themselves out a character at
a time, and a slow drift of small hearts using the same fill routine.
Answering "I forgive you" brightens the heart and bursts the drift
outward; answering "Not yet" dims it, slows the beat, and starts an
honest count of how long it has been waiting. Neither answer is an exit.
Supporting changes, all of them general rather than app-specific:
- gui_desktop_request_animation_frame(), so an app can opt into
full-rate recompositing instead of the ~10 Hz live-content
heartbeat. It is renewed per paint, so it lapses by itself when the
app stops animating or its window closes.
- gui_button_styled() and gui_hitzone() in SUB-WT, letting an app with
its own palette keep the toolkit's click handling. gui_button_colored
is now a thin wrapper over the former.
- A heart glyph in the icon set.
The glow layers skip whatever the heart body is about to cover, which
cuts their blended-pixel cost by roughly 3.5x and pays for the extra
layers that turn contour rings into a smooth halo.
Verified in QEMU on x86_64: all three states driven by real clicks --
hover, forgiveness (brighter heart, burst, live typewriter) and waiting
(dimmed heart, slower beat, running counter). Builds clean on x86_64,
aarch64 and armv8i.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Fh5z6V7nGPbHvqVG5p4CXX
The Settings window rendered fine but its controls only mutated the app's local
settings_data_t -- nothing was ever wired to the running system, so toggling
options did nothing ("not working").
- Appearance: "Show wallpaper grid overlay" now calls gui_desktop_set_grid()
live; the desktop grid shows/hides immediately.
- Input: "Show seconds in taskbar clock" now calls gui_desktop_set_clock_seconds();
the taskbar clock switches between HH:MM and HH:MM:SS.
- Power: the CPUFreq governor radios now call cpufreq_set_governor() (mapping the
UI order to the enum), and Apply/Defaults push all preferences to the system.
- The app seeds its controls from live state on open (grid/clock/governor), so it
reflects reality instead of hard-coded defaults.
Also add public gui_desktop_set_grid/get_grid and set/get_clock_seconds, and
give Settings a dedicated event handler that frees its state on close (the
shared app_forward_event leaked it).
Verified: Settings renders and its controls are wired to real effects; clean
build on x86_64/aarch64/armv8i; boots to the login gate with 0 panics / 0 OOM.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Fh5z6V7nGPbHvqVG5p4CXX
The compositor recomposited and re-uploaded the entire screen on every pass of
its loop. At the 1280x720 the desktop actually boots into, gui_gfx_present()
memcpy'd 3.6 MB into the framebuffer per frame, and the background underneath
it was recomputed pixel by pixel every time.
Present only the damage
- Keep a RAM shadow of what the framebuffer currently holds and diff the back
buffer against it, pushing just the changed span of each row. Reading the
shadow costs a RAM access; the framebuffer write it avoids costs far more,
and the framebuffer is never read back.
- Each row is narrowed to its first and last differing pixel rather than
tracked as a set of runs: one memcpy per row keeps the loop tight, and a row
that changed in two distant places is rare enough that bridging the gap is
cheaper than the bookkeeping.
- gui_gfx_invalidate() forces a full push for when something outside the
compositor owns the screen, which the desktop calls on entry and on exit
around the framebuffer console.
Cache the wallpaper
- The vertical gradient, the blended grid and the branding text never change
between frames, so they are painted once into a cached buffer and blitted
back per frame. The cache is keyed on resolution and the grid setting, so
toggling the grid from the context menu still repaints it.
No drawing code changed: the damage is derived from the frame itself, so every
widget, window and app keeps rendering exactly as before.
Measured in QEMU at 1280x720: an idle desktop with two windows open went from
921600 pixels per frame to 3609, about 0.4% of a full blit. A screendump of
the running desktop is unchanged -- wallpaper, grid, icons, both windows,
taskbar and cursor all render identically.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0161Jh7uCEMLYEMNPsjC1LKf
Turns the desktop from a fixed set of hand-drawn panels into a real
environment applications can be written against.
SUB-WT immediate-mode toolkit (gui/gui_widgets.c):
Buttons, labels, checkboxes, radios, sliders, list boxes, text fields, tab
bars, scrollbars, progress bars, sparklines and badges. An app feeds the WM
event into the toolkit and then calls widgets from its paint routine, so
each call both draws the control and reports what the user did with it --
no retained widget tree to keep in sync with window state.
Icons and dialogs:
gui_icons.c holds 14 16x16 palette-indexed glyphs stored as hex text, so the
art stays hand-editable and picks up theme changes for free; they scale by
integer factors and can be drawn as tint stencils. gui_dialog.c adds modal
info/warning/error/confirm dialogs that dim the desktop, take exclusive
input, word-wrap on spaces and report results through a callback.
Applications (gui/gui_apps_ext.c):
Settings (tabbed appearance/input/power), Task Manager (live process table
over task_find_by_pid with memory and heap gauges), Kernel Log viewer (reads
the dmesg ring, strips ANSI, colours by severity, scrolls), KTest Runner
(drives the in-kernel suites and reports 21/21 with timing), Clock & Calendar
(Zeller's congruence month grid) and a Text Editor.
Window manager (gui/gui_wm.c):
Minimize/maximize/restore buttons, a corner resize grip, edge snapping, tile
and cascade layouts, F5-F9 shortcuts, title truncation, and index-based
enumeration so the taskbar no longer assumes window ids stay dense.
Desktop shell (gui/gui_desktop.c):
Launcher icon grid, richer start menu, right-click context menu, taskbar
buttons that minimize and restore, and a live CPU trace in the tray.
Two interaction bugs fixed along the way:
- keyboard_get_key() blocks until a key arrives, so calling it every frame
froze the compositor; it is now gated on keyboard_has_key(), and stale
console input is drained before the first frame.
- When the desktop consumed a click, the WM's press-edge detector kept the
pre-press state and read the still-held button as a fresh press on the
next frame, stealing focus from whatever the click had just opened.
gui_wm_sync_button_state() keeps the two layers in step.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01L5yKJT4Wo2cV3rfPrwY5MP
- Upgrade resolution to 800x600 @ 32bpp TrueColor with Bochs/QEMU VBE LFB
- Implement full 8042 Aux PS/2 mouse controller driver on IRQ 12 (vector 44) with packet decode and bounds clamping
- Add high-definition 8x16 font rasterizer with text drop shadows for sharp typography
- Upgrade to smooth 16x24 anti-aliased cursor with dark slate outline and drop shadow
- Increase titlebars to 24px and taskbar to 32px with modern desktop styling
- Re-architect applications (SysMon, Terminal, Explorer, Calc, Paint, About) for spacious high-res display
- Create separate feature branch 'feat/gui-desktop'
- Implement double-buffered 2D graphics engine with alpha blending, gradients, rounded rects, and font rasterization in gui/gui_gfx.c and include/gui/gui_gfx.h
- Implement alpha-blended mouse pointer overlay in gui/gui_cursor.c and include/gui/gui_cursor.h
- Implement SUB-WM Window Manager with draggable titlebars, close/minimize buttons, drop shadows, and event routing in gui/gui_wm.c and include/gui/gui_wm.h
- Implement Cyberpunk/Nord desktop environment with wallpaper, taskbar, start menu popup, and system tray in gui/gui_desktop.c and include/gui/gui_desktop.h
- Implement built-in GUI apps: System Performance Monitor, GUI Terminal Emulator, File Explorer, Calculator, Paint Studio, and About dialog in gui/gui_apps.c and include/gui/gui_apps.h
- Add 'startx', 'gui', and 'desktop' applets in LazyBox suite
- Verified multi-architecture compilation across x86_64, AArch64, and ARMv8i
