The Living Desktop
The Living Desktop is the first pillar and, honestly, the reason the rest of Novaterra looks the
way it does. It’s not a dashboard you visit; it’s the home screen you never really leave. Route:
/world.
What it’s made of
Two layers, always:
- The field — a full-viewport WebGL shader canvas (custom GLSL, one of seven packs — see Themes and shader packs), or a user-supplied image or video with parallax and depth blur. It runs at 60fps, drifts with time of day and mood, and ripples softly when a Signal arrives — the desktop’s version of a notification that doesn’t shout.
- The glass — your widgets. Frosted, borderless, no chrome: each widget’s colour is drawn from
the field beneath it (dynamic palette extraction), so nothing looks like it was dropped on top.
They’re draggable, resizable, snap to a grid, and the layout is remembered per user via
GET|PUT /api/desktop/widgets.
The attention model
The desktop is quiet by default, and this is closer to a law than a preference (Article IX of the constitution). Concretely:
- Signals — decisions, insights, reminders, alerts, questions — arrive as soft ripples in the field, not badges or counters. See Signals and the omnibar.
- Decisions render as option cards you answer with one tap (
POST /api/desktop/signals/:id/answer), not modal interruptions. - Insights fade in when they’re relevant and fade out once you’ve seen them.
- The Now widget shows only what belongs to this moment: a greeting, one headline, open
signals, active project count, your next routine, and a mood word (
GET /api/desktop/now→NowResponse). Reading the Now is meant to be a one-minute daily ritual, not a feed to scroll.
In this section
- Every widget — all fourteen widget types, what each shows, and how the layout system works.
- Themes and shader packs — Aurora, Ocean, Nebula, Forest Light, Dawn, Ember, Void, and bringing your own image or video.
- Signals and the omnibar — how the desktop tells you what you need to know, and how you tell it anything back.
- Keyboard shortcuts — the full list.
Places, at a glance
| Route | What’s there |
|---|---|
/ | The public landing page (unauthenticated) |
/world | The Living Desktop |
/muse | Full Muse chat |
/twin | Memory, profile, connections |
/studio | Generators, projects, traces |
/market | Listings, orders, wallet |
/beings | The town square |
/settings | Themes, access codes, connections, LLM usage |
Transitions between places are cinematic: shared-layout animation, 300–500ms, custom easing — a breath of glass and light rather than a page load.