Building a Macintosh-Inspired Retro File System in the Browser

The author built an in-browser replica of the classic Macintosh desktop to showcase the Pinata Files API, with drag-and-drop file uploads, one-level folders, and per-user file isolation. The app uses only two dependencies, Clerk for authentication and Pinata for everything else, and its code is open source under the MIT license. Files are stored through Pinata's Private Files API, and folders are implemented as Pinata Groups, with each group name prefixed by the user ID so that users can each have a "Cats" folder. Desktop-only files are listed with a noGroup filter, and the interface styling combines the system.css library with Tailwind CSS. The author says the project took two days.