Frame of preference A history of Mac settings, 1984–2004(aresluna.org) |
Frame of preference A history of Mac settings, 1984–2004(aresluna.org) |
And the emulator tracks whether you've done the things mentioned in the article, like open a particular control panel or tried a particular menu option.
This is amazing.
I couldn't get the later emulators to work correctly though. My mouse kept flying off to the right of the screen for some reason. Also unfortunate is the scaling and tilting effect makes the screens look real bad on my machine. Just ugly aliasing artifacts everywhere.
I agree it would be nice to have an "untransformed" view of the screen; I suspect the site might have been designed with the expectation of a high-DPI screen.
> If you open this on a computer instead, you will have a chance to play with some emulators!
Instead of what? I was under the impression that the device I was on is a computer.
Edit: I was curious to understand what caused the site to show that box. From looking at the source and some interacting in the console, it seems to have been due to the 'isiOS' variable having the value 'true'. It was true despite the device not running iOS because '(navigator.maxTouchPoints && navigator.maxTouchPoints > 2)' was truthy, and window.MSStream wasn't. This device, a Surface Pro X, or more precisely the Chrome 139 browser running on it, reports 10 max touch points and doesn't have MSStream defined, and that appears to have been enough for it to be mistaken as a not-a-computer.
By now, after refreshing, I see an extra sentence 'Hey, site, you got it wrong. This is a real computer!' Perhaps the author saw this comment and added it quite quicky? If so, thank you!
> 2020s are the Lisa years. Outside of Accessibility, everything feels anodyne and disposable. There might not be a single control panel in modern macOS that feels like someone cares.
> Teddy Bears, managing memory, and Gizmo I don’t miss. But the care I do.
Using and seeing some of the earlier control panels, including in OS X, really drives this home.
Edit: good lord, what's it doing with these hotspots? Is all the checkbox progression outside of the emulators, in "screen space"? By analyzing specific pixels in the current emu framebuffer?!
https://aresluna.org/site/scripts-frame-of-preference.js?v60
The author has also written the keyboard book - Shift Happens[1]. Also an incredible love letter, this one for keyboards. I kickstarted it and cannot be happier!
You can make the list less squinty by playing with the “sidebar icon size” setting but this will also affect the sidebars in Finder, and maybe some other stuff around the system and programs that actually use the native widgets instead of cramming a web browser into a window, who knows, I just keep it at a size I like for the Finder.
Edit:
...and I completely missed that they're running live emulation!
While on the Apple side preference and settings might not always have been consistent and smooth sailing, the utter shambles we have had to endure on the Microsoft side in this area post Windows 7 is beyond any comparison.
The site loads just fine on my iPhone XS from 2018.
This is one of the worst designed websites I have ever opened