Devlog: Right-clicks, calendars and… a fortune cookie?!

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Fresh update to AuriaOS. Two new interface features, one new app and a bug that crashed the entire desktop before it got fixed. Right-clicking finally does something! Before this, right-clicking almost anything in AuriaOS just opened the browser’s own menu (“Reload / Inspect”) which ruined the illusion of a real little operating system.

Now right-clicking gives you a proper menu where it should:

A window’s title bar -> Minimize, Maximize/Restore, Always on Top, Close

An app in the taskbar -> Restore/Minimize, Close

Empty taskbar space -> Show Desktop, Close All Windows, Settings

Empty desktop space -> Personalize, Open a Terminal, Refresh

A desktop icon -> Open

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The genuinely new trick is “Always on Top”. Pin a window and it stays above every other window, no matter what else you click instead of getting buried like normal windows.

The clock finally does something!

The taskbar clock used to just show the time. Now you can click it and get a small calendar for the current month just like on a real computer. The calendar handles the fiddly stuff automatically. It knows how many days are in each month, accounts for February 29 in leap years and always lines up with Sunday as the start of the week. The faded days at the beginning and end fill out the grid so it doesn’t have awkward gaps. And if you leave the calendar open when midnight hits, it updates itself and moves the highlight to the new day without needing to be closed and reopened.

Actually building the Fortune Cookie App

It’s basically what it sounds like. A fortune cookie that you click to crack open. It shrinks and fades as if it’s actually being cracked,then a little paper slip slides into view with a fortune and six “lucky numbers” underneath just like a real fortune cookie.

The bug that broke everything

This was the messy part. It wasn’t really one bug but two bugs back to back both caused by the same basic mistake.

Bug one: the crash. To make the calendar auto-update, the clock code runs every second and checks whether the calendar popup is open. The problem was an ordering mistake. That check ran before the calendar popup had actually been set up.

Because the error happened near the top of the file, everything after it never got initialized including the taskbar and Start Menu click handlers. From the outside, the whole desktop looked dead. Frozen clock, dead Start Menu and an unresponsive taskbar.

Bug two: After fixing the crash, the calendar still wouldn’t open. Turns out I’d written all the code for the popup but forgotten to actually add the popup to the page. Most of the code quietly ignored the missing element but one part wasn’t so forgiving and could throw an error on every click anywhere in the app. Adding the missing element fixed it and I added safety checks around similar code so missing elements can’t cause the same mess again