Galaxy Browser v1.1.1

Introduction

Galaxy Browser offers an alternative way to organize and share knowledge—think Obsidian meets Chrome on a shared three-dimensional canvas.

Excalidraw Canvas

Instead of traditional digital documents and web pages that imitate physical paper, everything is rendered on the canvas with a UI overlay on top of it, enabling easy manipulation of texts, shapes, and images.

Macros Engine

Much like connecting cells in an Excel spreadsheet with macro functions, users can define their transformation functions here and apply them as arrows connecting the elements on the canvas. It's called computational knowledge because the viewer of the scene can re-evaluate it to ensure the correctness of information.

Polkadot Smart Contract

Users can organize their knowledge as layers and upload these layers as IPFS documents, then publish them into a smart contract registry with a given name, associated with their wallet ownership.

WebUI

It runs the frontend app in the existing user default browser, allowing it to interact with the locally running app backend in both ways. At the same time, the frontend app can interact with the Polkadot wallet installed as an extension in the browser.

Deno.KV

When saving a layer, its elements and images are saved into SQLite locally and persisted on the disk.

Compiled Executable

The desktop app is compiled as an executable for cross-platform use on macOS, Linux, and Windows. When running, it checks for frontend updates from a public repo and reloads cached files if available.

Tauri bundler

The executable is bundled into DMG, EXE, or AppImage formats for easy distribution. It includes the Deno engine but does not include Chromium; instead, it communicates with the user's browser through WebUI.

Dynamic Imports

Bundling packages on the fly with esbuild allows users to write complex macro scripts with remote dependencies, even composing cross-language macros.

Conclusion

It's a solid foundation for merging a knowledge management system with web browsers on the infinite canvas playground.