Hi there! I’m trying to do a project where I’m recreating the home-screen of a windows computer. My goal is to make it interactive so the text files, home button, and folders are clickable. The home button would take the user back to the regular screen then the folders and files will open up photos/ videos. There will be an actual pop up window for it when it gets clicked on. I attached a visual of what I’m wanting it to do and was wondering what the best way to go about it is. Thanks for your help!
I would install https://embody.tools and work with Claude Opus 5.5 on this. With clear and concise direction, it will probably get you most of the way there, if not completely. Your markups will also help it a lot – I would provide it your brief as you’ve described above.
It’s a really fun way to create, and I have spent thousands of hours refining how Embody approaches TouchDesigner projects, to ensure the highest quality output. Please ping me on Discord or DM me here if you run into any issues – cheers!
Yes AI could do it but this is a great learning project!
Overall you should view this as container comps for every little item and the containers can be treated like divs in web design / html.
You can either nest the container comps inside of each other or connect them by the top and bottom wires for a parent child relationship.
In this case I would make a full size container called Desktop, with children rules of bottom to top, inside of which is a container called Taskbar that is full width and anchored to the bottom, with a fixed height. Then next to it put container called “icon space” which fills the remaining area.
The Taskbar can hold your start menu button, clock area, and any icons for open “windows”.
The icon space can hold a collection of containers called Icon, I would probably make a single container comp with all logo options with custom pars for Title and Icon and onClick callback/action and then clone it. Positioning can be by children grid or manually positioned.
The part that is probably tripping you up is that every window you might want to create should exist hidden in another overlay, lets call it “Window Space”. When you click on one of the icons, listen for that action with a panelCHOP or a panel execute DAT, and use a small callback to open whichever “window” you want (setting its display parameter to true or false)
I know for certain there is a way make the top bar of your Window container draggable but I’m not 100 percent sure about how.
The actual “WindowCOMP” is not going to help you here, FYI, until you get to displaying this in perform mode fullscreen on a monitor. Its all just containers and containers all the way down. Look at the op snippets for ContainerCOMPs and ButtonCOMPs to understand better what you have to work with!
