ModernActiveDesktop

• ModernActiveDesktop, also known as Windows 98 Desktop Experience, is a highly customizable re-creation of the classic Windows desktop.
• Started as a crappy Active Desktop clone, ModernActiveDesktop now features various useful apps that resemble the classic Windows components that will improve your desktop experience.
• Primarily designed for Wallpaper Engine, but now it should work well on other modern browsers as well. Lively Wallpaper is also supported.
  
  Video Screenshot
  Old Screenshot (circa 2.3)
  
  
• Steam Workshop
• Try in your browser

Included Apps

Icon	Name	Description	Links
	Channel Bar	The Channel Bar from Windows 98 First Edition or IE4	Link
	JSPaint	A web-based remake of MS Paint	Original MAD Version
	Solitaire	A web-based remake of MS Solitaire	Original MAD Version
	Clock	A web-based remake of NT4 clock.exe	Link
	Visualizer	A music visualizer for Wallpaper Engine WMP6 style controls with WMP7+ bar visualization Lively Wallpaper is partially supported	Link
	ChannelViewer	An IE4 remake with some elements of IE6 Supports loading webpages with a classic look and features	Link
	Calculator	A web-based remake of Windows calculator	Link
	Configurator	Remake of the 'Display Properties' and 'Internet Options' control panel applets Some of them are pretty pixel-perfect to the original	Main, Internet

Included Themes

• XP
  • A CSS theme based on XP.css
  • Fallback schemes: Blue, Olive Green, Silver, and Royale
• Aero
  • A CSS theme based on 7.css
• Windows 9x / 2000 Classic schemes
• Plus! 95 and 98 schemes
• Windose
  • Simple CSS theme based on the looks of Needy Girl Overdose
  • Only the title bars are themed; other controls will use the generic Classic styles
• Catppuccin Mocha
• Windows 1-3 schemes
• Windows 11 high contrast schemes
• Three schemes found in the JSPaint source files
• All Classic schemes feature unique window metrics and font settings
• Can fetch system color schemes if the system plugin is being used
• Also supports loading Windows *.theme files and an exported file of the "HKCU\Control Panel\Colors" registry key

Todo

• ChannelViewer
  • Hook fetch / XHR with fetchProxy to get AJAX sites working when force-loaded
  • Also deal with the origin header - Google, YT, etc. checks for it and returns 403. This also affects Wallpaper Engine or other environments with the same origin policy disabled.
• WindowMetrics (extra-border-size) support for Active Desktop style DeskMovers
• More themes to add
  • Windows 3.x
    • I think it would be pretty easy, just give it flat title bars and buttons with border-radius
  • Windows Vista/7 Basic
  • Windows 8
    • Maybe just modifying the Aero theme a bit would work
  • Aero Lite
  • Windows 10/11?
  • Mac OS 7?
  • Also if I implement the Win3 theme, I should make a separate visual style selector in the appearance control panel, like the one in XP
• Split the main scripts into multiple JS files
  • Current main JS structure (DeskMover + DeskSettings) hasn't really changed since 1.0 lol
• Support multi-display background wallpaper configuration?

Notes

• ModernActiveDesktop is primarily optimized for Chromium 98 and higher. Some features may not work or look well on other browsers.

Changelog

3.2

• Added Clock and Calculator
• Revamped the ChannelViewer
  • It now more resembles IE4 or IE6
  • It can now open pages that don't allow embedding
  • Improved external link handling
  • Note: the system plugin ChannelViewer has been deprecated. Please use the in-wallpaper ChannelViewer or any external browser on your system
• Improved the customization settings
  • You can now adjust the window metrics and font settings. Updated the built-in themes to have unique metrics as well
  • Made the configuration window pretty pixel-perfect to the 98 appearance control panel
  • Added an option to hide the keyboard navigation underlines
  • Added an option to show only window outlines when dragging
  • Support saving color schemes to the storage
  • Support importing Windows theme files and exported color registry files
  • Support exporting scheme as CSS or JSON by typing !copycss or !copyjson to the scheme save dialog
  • Support adjusting the top and bottom margins. Adjust these based on your desktop, for example, the bottom margin would be the size of the taskbar.
  • Support exporting and importing the complete configuration of ModernActiveDesktop
  • Resetting configs will only remove its own configs and not touch other wallpaper's ones
• Added a Windows Aero theme, and improved the XP theme
  • JSPaint will use Windows Vista or Windows XP looks if you use one of these themes
• Added more Classic schemes
  • Catppuccin Mocha
  • Some Plus! themes that were missing previously
  • Reverted the 98 Classic scheme to 3.0 one, as this was indeed the correct one.
  • The previous 98 scheme of MAD 3.1 has been renamed to Windows Classic (98SE) - in fact, this slightly different variant of the Classic scheme is also present in later versions of Windows.
• More controls, including radio buttons and dropdowns, now follow the color scheme
• Visualizer updates
  • Added more configurable options to the visualizer
  • Added fullscreen mode
  • Automatically pause drawing when idle to reduce the CPU usage
• ChannelBar is now an openable app, like the visualizer and others
  • It no longer re-opens when opening a new window
• Made various UI elements look more accurate
  • Added ClientEdge in various places
• Added localization support
  • Added Korean language
• Windows now can be resized diagonally
• Added support for Firefox and iOS Safari, as well as touchscreens
• Support menu navigation with keyboard (when keyboard input is available)
• Moving the mouse over the menu while playing the animation effect will cancel the animation
• Updated dependencies (Electron, JSPaint)

Hotfixes

• Corrected the version string
• Fix the XP theme looking broken in some places

3.2.1

• Fixed several bugs
  • Placeholder message being shown instead of a proper error message when trying to enable media integration features without having it enabled in Wallpaper Engine settings
  • Effect options not saving well when changing the appearance options
  • Short dropdown lists showing scroll bars when the display scaling is set to higher than 100%
  • Bottom-right resize area of some pages not disappearing when resetting the window or navigating to another page
• Improved the system window metrics retrieval to get more accurate metrics when the system DPI is higher than 100%
• Improved the fullscreen window handling
• Improved menu behavior regarding submenus
• ChannelViewer: Fixed the link navigation not working well on certain pages
• Empty margin input fields will now be treated as 0
• Visualizer improvements
  • Added an option to hide the borders around the visualization area
  • Added an option to adjust the decrement speed
  • Fixed right channel being visible when channel separation is set to 'Combine left and right channels' and fixed bar width is enabled
  • Fixed visualization not showing right after switching from Album Art to WMP Bars
  • Fixed erroneously getting out of idle power-saving state on random occasions
• Added access keys for some elements with an underline

(2024/4/19)

Previous changelog

Please see here for the previous changes

Copyright (c) 2024 Ingan121
Licensed under the MIT license