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Recreating macOS’s Drift Screensaver with Rust and WASM

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21–30 of 47 posts

Re: Recreating macOS’s Drift Screensaver with Rust and WASM

#21
post #17

Why did screensavers ever do anything besides just blanking the screen?

In the era of beige crt monitors and not caring about electricity consumption it was all the rage to personalise your screensaver. A lot of people used them to display personal pics of their animals, family, cars etc. in place of putting physical pics on the desk. In a corporate environment with uniforms people did what they could to add some flare :-)

Re: Recreating macOS’s Drift Screensaver with Rust and WASM

#25

I guess a screensaver is only useful if the screen startup is slow.

In a library setting they were useful to show availability.

Often Users would press the power button, when the screen was blank, even if the PC was on. Boot time was longer than two minutes and the filesystems generally didn't have journaling and were prone to corruption, when rebooted that way.

Re: Recreating macOS’s Drift Screensaver with Rust and WASM

#26

It's taxing on CPU and GPU: normal | running screensaver in browser CPU: 5% | 15% GPU: 10% | 45%

To be fair, so is the original Drift screensaver from Apple. I only briefly used it before realising it was gobbling up tons of power and heating my laptop up.

Re: Recreating macOS’s Drift Screensaver with Rust and WASM

#27
post #17

Why did screensavers ever do anything besides just blanking the screen?

In the era of beige crt monitors and not caring about electricity consumption it was all the rage to personalise your screensaver. A lot of people used them to display personal pics of their animals, family, cars etc. in place of putting physical pics on the desk. In a corporate environment with uniforms people did what they could to add some flare :-)

Yep. The Matrix screensaver took over my office by storm in 1999.

Re: Recreating macOS’s Drift Screensaver with Rust and WASM

#28
post #20

"it might stand to dethrone the venerable Flurry screensaver" - You are absolutely right. The first time I saw the screensaver, I was completely mesmerized and watched it for a few minutes before getting back to work. Out of curiosity, why Rust? Not saying anything against it, just looking to understand your take on it.

Without a response from the parent, I'm guessing they wanted it to be in wasm, and Rust is one of the more popular languages for wasm development.

Re: Recreating macOS’s Drift Screensaver with Rust and WASM

#29
post #17

Why did screensavers ever do anything besides just blanking the screen?

If you worked with color (like graphics designer for example) you wanted to avoid turning off your monitor because you needed at least 30 minutes of warm up to stabilize brightness and color fidelity of a CRT. Showing anything beside blank screen indicated to you that the computer is turned on. Animation has been obvious to avoid burn in.
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