Clarus returns home in macOS Ventura

ex-Apple here.. way past caring about Executive Management after repeated torturous treatment of indie developers at the hands of legal.

> the people in charge of the Mac are now people who _grew up with it_, who love it, and who have that same nostalgia as (some) of us outside Apple.

So then how does one explain the unending UI regressions with every single major update? This whole system preferences thing for example? The terrible, terrible toolbars combined with window titles? The borderless buttons (with borders being an accessibility feature)? The utter disregard of the pixel grid? Everything else slowly becoming ever more un-desktop?

This is so great. The 90s/pre OS-X Apple (the "BuT tHeREs No SOFtWaRe!" and "ApPLe is GoING tO DiiEE" Apple) had a sense of playfulness in their UIs that was largely lost when they became the Apple we know today.

The Mac OS classic architecture definitely had some problems with its non-protected memory and cooperative multitasking, but what it _allowed_ were extensions that could really get in there and muck around with things… and I looovvvved the zaniness that provided. To name a few:

- ResEdit! - Extensions that could seriously improve your computer's performance like RamDoubler or SpeedDoubler - That extension that made Oscar the grouch climb out of the trash can and sing a little ditty when you emptied the trash - The talking moose was fun for about 15 minutes, but still, I love the attitude. - After Dark! - Easter eggs like that "secret about box" text clipping thing that pulled up the pirate flag flying over the Apple Campus. - Playful messaging like "Installing System Morsels", or Sim City 2000's "Reticulating Splines" - Even the iconography was more playful—that little bloated mac icon in the Memory control panel next to Virtual Memory comes to mind

I miss the crew of developers, capabilities, and playfulness we lost in transitioning to OSX, but am thrilled that tiny fragments of this playfulness seem to be returning.

Welcome back Clarus! Moof!

> The keen-eyed among you may notice that although, it had a .pdf extension in assetutil info, I’ve given it here as a PNG. I was confused by this too, but upon closer inspection I believe the PNG is what ships with the OS. Although the .car format is not documented, you can still open it up in a hex viewer and learn a bit about what it contains. Looking through it, there appears to be some metadata for each file, followed by the image data itself.

I reverse engineered the asset catalog format for a bit recently, hoping to be able to unpack and repack existing ones to create system appearances (themes/skins — these also come as .car files, and you can load one as an NSAppearance object and then apply it to your app/window/view).

If it says it's a PDF, then it must be an actual PDF as a "raw data" rendition. I did successfully extract some with nothing but my own code. But, there are no PNGs present in .car files; as of Monterey, bitmap images use a proprietary undocumented compression format called "deepmap2". I wasn't able to exactly reconstruct how it works because my skills of native code reverse engineering are lacking (or am I not using Ghidra correctly to get at least somewhat sensible code out of it?), but I did find the related functions in the vImage framework inside Accelerate.framework.

> I, er, accidentally updated my laptop to the beta

Good to know it wasn't just me. I also expected it to be an installer that let me choose a different volume to install on.