Lawd I miss the simplicity.
Infinite Mac
261–270 of 340 posts
Re: Infinite Mac
#262This does bring back memories, especially Think Reference! This was an application that came with Think C and contained a full reference to all of the System APIs. It was Inside Macintosh, with all documentation a simple click away. And it was all locally stored, and blazingly fast. After I had moved from Think C to CodeWarrior, Think Reference remained my go-to documentation.
Nowadays with everything on bloated web pages, a simple API lookup takes seconds, and may be out of date.
Good times.
Thank you!
Re: Infinite Mac
#263No Crystal Quest!?
Re: Infinite Mac
#264Creator of the site here. There's a blog post with the technical details if you're curious about how it works and whose work it builds on: https://blog.persistent.info/2022/03/blog-post.html There are also a couple of variants that boot either System 7.5.3 or KanjiTalk 7.5.3 (the Japanese version of MacOS): https://system7.app/ and https://kanjitalk7.app/
As someone who was involved in the creation of Infini-D back in the day, I can only say that this brought a smile to my face and that I've shared it with the whole original team. Thank you! Thank you!
Re: Infinite Mac
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. This matches to what was thought (at the time? I'm not sure if research has changed the thinking on this) to be the size of human working memory. 7 ± 2 was believed to be about how much a human could understand with zero layers of abstraction, i.e. "in parallel" (you can imagine your brain has 7 ± 2 registers, though that's a highly inaccurate model). Any larger, and your brain has to build abstractions to refer…
As opposed to "nested two levels deep under one item or another on the File…or was it View…or maybe Window…menu? No? Okay, then try holding down Option…" I still think that searchable menus was one of the killer features of OS X vs. anything else at the time, and it's frankly amazing that the majority of Windows apps still don't have menu search.
This is the some reason I use raycast. I mapped search menu to a global hot key
Re: Infinite Mac
#266Where is Escape Velocity?
Re: Infinite Mac
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Everyone switched from bitmaps to vectors over a decade ago and now everything is fuzzy, antialiased, scalable, flat, hard to make out. That makes no sense. Bitmaps have a fixed pixel density while vectors are infinitely scalable.
Vectors will scale to any pixel density, but they look irritatingly fuzzy at the lower pixel densities you commonly see in large widescreen monitors. Obviously it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, but decades ago bitmapped fonts could give you crisp text on any monitor, and in 2022 I'm using a popular, >$1300, very favorably reviewed monitor, and the text is ever-so-slightly fuzzy. It's plugged into my Macbook Pr…
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Re: Infinite Mac
#268Creator of the site here. There's a blog post with the technical details if you're curious about how it works and whose work it builds on: https://blog.persistent.info/2022/03/blog-post.html There are also a couple of variants that boot either System 7.5.3 or KanjiTalk 7.5.3 (the Japanese version of MacOS): https://system7.app/ and https://kanjitalk7.app/
Any chance you can add Meat Gone Bad? https://www.macintoshrepository.org/6032-meat-gone-bad
Re: Infinite Mac
#269Re: Infinite Mac
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
same. it's hard to describe how 10-year-old me felt about 8bit dithered graphics sparkling through phosphorus but 30 years later the magic is gone. I can't point to any one thing (maybe the advent of webapps) but it has something to do with software just generally becoming more and more sucky.
How user hostile technology has become killed the magic for me. I constantly have to think about not being tracked on the web, manipulated by an ad or astroturfed, scammed by companies with fake reviews, exploited by "algorithms", dodging dark patterns, fighting my OS to do what I want, protecting my data and privacy, hackers stealing my data from companies I entrusted it with, cryptoscams, IoT devices leaking my dat…
> How user hostile technology has become
Hm, I don’t know - old DOS was pretty user hostile, but it rewarded people with the patience to stick with it. Nowadays there’s no reward.