Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Infinite Mac

macos8.app

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 340 posts

Re: Infinite Mac

#271

Post by Sophistifunk »

commandlinefan wrote: post #214
PortiaBerries wrote: post #208

Sigh, this makes me realize how much I loved computers when I was a kid (1990s) and how much I hate them now.

Huh, that's funny. I never really thought about it, but I kind of feel the same way now that you point it out. Or rather, I used to love computers just for the sake of being computers and was always a little annoyed by people who saw them rather as a means to a different end. However, today, I definitely see my macbook pro, ipad and iphone as nothing more than a means to an end, the way people saw old PCs.

It's because we live in a very low-agency world, an effect which is massively more noticeable when you're underage, and computers represented a tiny universe where through hard work and learning you could gain control and eventual mastery.

Re: Infinite Mac

#274

Post by ineedasername »

Ah, reminds of my days working tech at a newspaper and dealing with Error Type 10 showing up at 2:00 AM as we tried to wrap production for the issue.

Sure, the OS was more stable than the Windows of that time, but I grew to hate those machines & their cute little bomb icon in the error message more than I've ever hated a Windows box.

In fairness to Apple it generally only happened with Adobe apps, usually right as a long job was about to finish. Those apps & their janky extensions that required trial & error to identify a conflict were awful. I hated them as much as I hated the machines. Whose fault it was didn't matter, they both ate countless hours of sleep.

Re: Infinite Mac

#275

Post by [deleted] »

shadowgovt wrote: post #107
doubled112 wrote: post #7

It's exactly how I remember the Macs my grade school was using back then. Click around a little bit, and boom, it is frozen. Do you wait? Do you force quit? The watch gives little feedback.

Cooperative multitasking architecture. If the frontmost thread doesn't `WaitNextEvent`, not even the OS gets a chance to update the UI (with some key exceptions... I think the mouse was interrupt-driven?). OS 8 started to add preemptive multitasking, but it wasn't mandatory and apps had to buy-in to it (so they didn't break backwards compatibility). Incidentally, games would squeeze a few more cycles out of the compu…

[deleted]

Re: Infinite Mac

#276

Post by Sargos »

kalel83 wrote: post #123
mihaip wrote: post #99

Creator 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/

I would love it if you could include the game lunatic fringe in this.

There's an open source web version I worked on at GitHub if you want to play an in-dev version that works on modern computers.

https://github.com/jackinloadup/lunatic-fringe

Click to play: https://jackinloadup.github.io/lunatic-fringe/

Re: Infinite Mac

#277

Post by marssaxman »

bad_good_guy wrote: post #93
moth-fuzz wrote: post #69

What does one have to do to get as clear and pretty of a UI as that on the modern desktop OSes? Everyone switched from bitmaps to vectors over a decade ago and now everything is fuzzy, antialiased, scalable, flat, hard to make out. Of course you can always run dwm on linux with a hodgepodge of makeshift utility apps, write your own keybinds to set your brightness and volume and other such inanities, but in order to g…

> What does one have to do to get as ... pretty of a UI Are you being intentionally disingenuous? It is objectively not a pretty UI, it's a functional but quite ugly one.

Ugliness and prettiness are inherently subjective concepts. There can be no such thing as "objectively not a pretty UI"!

Re: Infinite Mac

#278

Post by marssaxman »

commandlinefan wrote: post #270
imiric wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Old systems may not have been friendly, but they were never out to get you; they were merely indifferent, and your job was to make them work. Modern systems, for all their aesthetic effort, know that you are a valuable resource, and try to exploit you; your job is to keep them contained.

Re: Infinite Mac

#279

Post by p1necone »

jassmith87 wrote: post #164
dkarl wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The problem is you have it plugged into a macbook. Apple doesn't support subpixel anti-aliasing in any of its latest releases. Your monitor looks so fuzzy because Apple has removed the capability to make it not look so fuzzy.

This is only part of the reason. The other reason is that Apple doesn't actually do fractional UI scaling, they only ever render into a framebuffer at whole integer multiples of an internal "native" resolution and then scale down this framebuffer to the actual monitor resolution afaik (they still render natively to this multiplied resolution - no doubled pixels or anything like that).

This results in less crisp output than you would get if you actually rendered vector based UI at the exact monitor resolution or if you natively rendered bitmap art 1:1 with the monitor resolution.

This approach makes sense when you're only using Apples monitors because they can optimize their internal "native" resolutions for the handful of actual native resolutions they offer, but it falls apart when you start plugging in external third party lower dpi monitors.

(I believe this is also the same approach that Gnome 3 uses to do (experimental, with a toggle) non integer multiple UI scaling.)

Re: Infinite Mac

#280

Post by windows2020 »

Anyone else recall writing too much text in a sticky note and not having enough memory to close it?

This reminds me of a period of longing for Windows so I could play RCT & The Sims.

Perhaps due to the inconsistent and unmetaphorical interfaces of today, this one seems near futuristic.

Post reply on HN