rezmason

> ...[A]t the Ust’-Polui site near Salekhard, on the Ob River, archaeologists have found beads... believed to have originated in the Roman Empire or from Parthian production centres

Aw man, I would set a one-way time machine to a 2nd Century Parthian bead production center for the ASMR alone. If I ever got bored I could just hitchhike to Alaska.

Ten thousand lights! Your utility bill must be enormous

I haven't heard much about Cory Arcangel in a while, this is a great way to learn what he's been up to

> Yea but why use a mac at that point?

I ask myself that with increasing frequency. Looking at all the Linux options feels like wandering through Akihabara, but one day the macOS that remains will be so unlike the macOS I enjoyed, that I'll jump the fence.

Anyway, if someone does make a new Mac desktop environment, it'd probably be for fun more than anything. Or a Terry Davis scenario.

I should have mentioned a couple other things:

1. Kaleidoscope (the most common OS 9 theme system extension) runs fine under emulation, so if you just want to _enjoy_ these themes, your best bet is the SheepShaver emulator (in my opinion).

2. Nothing's stopping us from creating an alternative desktop environment for the Mac, such as XQuartz. And then you can build theme support on top of something like that. But most applications wouldn't use that desktop environment for their own UI.

The short answer is, sadly, no— Apple has the modern macOS UI locked up.

The long answer is, if you're willing to disable systemwide security features, you can experiment with modifying the appearance of macOS, but to my knowledge no one has made a real attempt to in a while. Furthermore, the themes on display here fit a paradigm where the UI is a composite of bitmap images, whereas the modern macOS is largely built from vector graphics.

But if you vectorize every bitmap in an old theme, so that individual pixels of color are converted to vector graphic rectangles; if you learn how modern macOS builds its appearance; if you make a robust solution and thoroughly test it, so that it will work 100% of the time with every app ever; if you do _all_ of that, you will still be unable to _share_ your creation with most Mac users, because very few of us would disable systemwide security for the sake of running a third party system enhancement.

That's one of the major contributors to the success of Mac OS 9 theming: third party system extensions were commonplace, they were the backbone of the ecosystem, and Apple had no mechanism for preventing their use.

Almost twenty years ago, a lady walked into my former employer, from right off the street, to ask that they unsubscribe her from the mailing list. She was in town on vacation and realized their offices were there, and just thought it'd be nice to get that dealt with in person. Especially because her attempts to unsubscribe electronically had repeatedly failed.

Almost fifteen years ago, another of my former employers had an angry customer storm into their office and start shouting at the front desk associate. Soon after they relocated, and hired a full-time armed security guard to process all visitors straight from the elevator lobby. Any further, and you'd need to present photo ID and maybe sign an NDA before he'd buzz you in.

Keep making cool things, kuberwastaken

If there was a product that let me convey "Come back later" to a barging inquirer with a sharp and uncanny hand motion, I might consider paying $249 for it:

https://cdn.flipperzero.one/lekyb_desktop_004.mp4

Shouldn't the galaxies in the northern and southern hemispheres spiral in opposite directions? /s

If RMS or Gruber released code with any frequency, I think the HN community would be very interested. I wouldn't necessarily warm up to either of them, but it would lend a lot of credence to whatever their stances are.

Apple's business relies tremendously on its developer relations. If Gruber doesn't regularly navigate that wedge of the ecosystem, then I don't think he can speak with authority on its soundness. I mean I wouldn't!

Maybe. I landed on "shill" because it's a word he chose, and it seemed to fit when I read it. Let me try and define what it means, and how it's different from an advocate, an apologist or a sycophant.

A shill promotes something to others partly because that thing's success aligns with their prosperity. That causal chain motivates them to look past the thing's flaws, the people it negatively impacts, and the merits of its alternatives. If we're talking about an org with a stance or policy, the shill is incentivized to align with the org's stance over the stance of its competitors, its customers, and even the org's previous stances, because it's the org in its current incarnation that rewards the shill. However, if the org does something to jeopardize its relation to the shill's prosperity, the shill can criticize the org. Pom poms are optional.

Can someone with intelligence and an open mind be a shill? I emphatically believe so. Well-working minds and hearts can compartmentalize, rationalize and internalize. They can strengthen cognitive dissonance. The incentive to shill can live snugly in that habitat.

Sidenote— In my personal opinion, if there were slightly more or louder John Grubers in the world, there'd be far fewer John Calhouns.

I don't read your blog because your analyses ring true. I read your blog because you are an impactful pundit who I can stomach. Thoughtful people with large followings bore unspoken biases throughout the past and present, and it is my purposeful exercise to engage with the content of one who's alive mainly talks about Apple.

I suspect you have many readers like me. I don't mean that we all disagree with you the exact same way— that would be absurd. I mean that we'll read something sincere but misguided, because that's a valuable element of discourse.

Your Harrison Bergeron allusion wasn't apt, it was memorably cringey, a local extremum. It was ridiculous on its face. We can't know what Vonnegut would think of it, but he might have chosen to write you into Cat's Cradle.

Thanks for bringing my attention to the comment guidelines, I'll try to keep to them in the future. I assure you, I do write here in good faith.

I'm open to listening to those who oppose the EU's position on Apple's ecosystem. I draw the line at people comparing Apple's circumstances with those portrayed in Harrison Bergeron. Apple, its developer community and its app ecosystem are unlike anyone in that story, and they certainly aren't oppressed rebels. That comparison was an editorial choice made by John Gruber in his coverage of tech news, including a link to a copy of the story he personally typeset. It rang loudly then of sentimental bias, and it's still ringing.

I don't have evidence of the makeup of the Daring Fireball readership, but many of them are at least adjacent to the tech industry, and so his words have incredible reach, Hacker News notwithstanding. But what are his credentials? When he weighs the merits of a programming language, an API, a platform, or anything technical, I want him to speak from experience. Collaborating with Aaron Swartz twenty-one years ago on Markdown is respectfully not very relevant technical experience in the domains DF traditionally covers. Vesper was one ObjC app written by three people in 2013. I'm glad it was well-received, but again, what significance does Gruber's experience have? Why should the industry listen to him when he (admittedly not so often nowadays) discusses software development? If asked, I think he'd strongly agree that people in power should have considerable relevant experience.

PS— the article that began this discussion is, "The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss". As you can see, I've been eager, not afraid, to discuss the merits of Daring Fireball, though not so eager as to upvote it on HN.

This is my workhorse for any kind of Macintosh retrocomputing. I've tested HTML on old browsers with it, I've opened old documents and played old games, for longer than my time using real classic Macs. For a free and open source program, it's highly dependable.

This was hard, but fun!

One suggestion: make empty spaces visually distinct from filled spaces. Why? Because cell 73 in the tenth puzzle (today's) is small enough that I completely overlooked it, and used faulty logic to deduce all but two spaces before I discovered it. I was ready to file a bug report!

I'll meet you halfway— if you'll please consider my feature request, I'll go visit my optometrist. :D

Took me a minute, too. :D

Besides, what's wrong with getting one's apparel at Banana Republic?

I think that if we tried, we could come up with a pretty large cookbook of stone soups.

Zachtronics Solitaire Collection inspired me to begin experimenting with Solitaire variants, and hopefully Balatro's well-deserved success will stoke people's curiosity in similar titles.

For now, my web prototype lets you choose the numbers of suits, colors, ranks, columns, and multiples of cards drawn from the deck. It's a start. I invite HN to explore the Klondike Extended Universe:

https://rezmason.github.io/patience

I thought this was especially well said:

> Don't choose tools that alienate you from your work. Choose tools that leverage the wisdom you've already accumulated, and which help you to cultivate a deeper understanding of the discipline.

What timing! I'd just worked out* the "stickfont" or "open-path font" or "stroke font" that one of my favorite defunct games rendered with GL_LINE_STRIP, and it seems to be from the Hershey glyph set. If you haven't heard of it, it's a remarkable achievement of one individual contributor, essentially a career engineer applying vector graphic rendering to technical lettering.

http://www.whence.com/hershey-fonts

* with the help of others ^_^

As much as I like regaining autonomy, we should hold back those tears until a patient's implant outlasts a product cycle. I can't find the article to link to, but there's an ongoing issue with tech companies producing assistive devices or prosthetics and obsoleting them when the company pivots, gets bought or goes under.

Corporate cyborg parts are an already-predicted nightmare, already taking place, unfolding in slow motion, and soon it will breach the sanctity of human thought.

I think it's very sneaky, how the world manages to conceal so many alternative ways of life by situating them outside the United States /s

My college campus store sold colorful translucent floppy disks as recently as 2009. They felt anachronistic.

It helps that other people struggled with this macOS Ventura era stuff out in the open, so when my QA tester (hi dad!) told me my screensaver was misbehaving in System Settings, the discourse came up in GitHub's search results.

Oh— and when researching for Iconic, I dug up BackSpace for NeXTSTEP and learned how OS X's ScreenSaver.framework came about. Devs distributing modules they produced for other devs' projects was much more prevalent in the early nineties! SuperSolitaire II, for instance, accepted a ".solitaire" program module and shipped a separate set of varieties:

https://ftp.nice.ch/pub/next/games/card/_SuperSolitaireModul...

HN is on fire today with visual spectacle.

OP will you describe how color propagates through these?

The Mac screensaver ecosystem's going through some interesting shifts in recent years. The permissions and stated capabilities of 3rd party software are much more delineated now, but screensaver modules are architected in an old NeXTSTEP kind of way, where software you trust loads and runs software you don't.

It's not visible to end users, but nowadays, Apple-authored screensavers use a private framework, and 3rd party screensavers use the traditional framework. Sometimes the traditional framework hiccups. Because these aren't essential programs, presumably they are lower priority, so it may be a while before things settle:

https://github.com/AerialScreensaver/ScreenSaverMinimal?tab=...

https://github.com/AerialScreensaver/ScreenSaverMinimal/wiki...

Nevertheless, here are a few more contemporary offerings:

https://github.com/agarrharr/awesome-macos-screensavers

And here's mine from last year! Got another one in the works.

https://github.com/Rezmason/Iconic

I know it's a few years old, but you've also got a great portfolio of previous work OP: https://thestrikeagency.com

I know the kind of work and love that goes into this kind of project. From one software nostalgiac to another, I salute you noduerme