10 Responses:

1. feren says:

   17 years ago at 8:07 pm

   My MacBook thanks you for continuing to provide it with awesomness to display, as do my office workstations.

2. usufructer says:

   17 years ago at 9:51 pm

   Bug fixes are good.

   Is there any way to make Substrate run faster?

   • jwz says:

     17 years ago at 10:57 pm

     All of the non-GL programs are too slow, and I'm basically out of ideas.

     Wait two years, and it'll be fast on your new computer.

     • usufructer says:

       17 years ago at 11:17 pm

       Ah. The golden days of being able to do things quickly onscreen in odd ways ended with MacOS 8, from what I've seen. Some of the old screen hacks were amazing.

       I downloaded the code, but don't expect to have any eureka moments on it. Ultimately it seems like you need an Apple insider who knows too much about how things actually work, and for some reason they spend far too little time making screensavers.

       Actually, now that I say that, do you know if the visualizer in iTunes is GL or not? If not, someone knows how to do complex stuff quickly.

       Though suboptimal, have you tried automatically changing the screen resolution for the slowest ones? It looks like it's full resolution in the newest iTunes, but in older versions I remember it dumping down to a lower resolution and it seemed like it was doing something with interlacing or line doubling.

       Thanks for the effort.

       • elliterati says:

         17 years ago at 8:26 am

         Apple licensed parts of G-Force from this guy for the iTunes visualizer. Don't know if it's GL or not, though.

         • strspn says:

           17 years ago at 11:03 am

           Why do all the "music visualizations" on all platforms look like finger paintings?

           • feren says:

             17 years ago at 4:55 pm

             Because the only people who bother with the stupid visualizer-things are usually so stoned their senses would make them go orgasmic over a mud puddle?

     • christtrekker says:

       17 years ago at 11:16 am

       Wait...I'm running those modules on a 33 MHz 68k Mac, and they run too slow on 500+ MHz PPC/Intel Macs? Something's not right there...

       • jwz says:

         17 years ago at 11:33 am

         You are correct. Something is wrong here.

         And I think that something is called "Cocoa", which means "to draw a pixel, you have to spray ink through Display Postscript".

3. saltation_lj says:

   17 years ago at 4:29 am

   i just saw this and thought of you and the stories you've posted of your netscape times (which i find hard to read due to them being all too familiar and my bloodpressure going through the roof as all the repressed memories of what-coulda-been come boiling back out of the pit).

   and this seemed the least-inappropriate thread to pass it on on.

   http://thedailywtf.com/forums/thread/91574.aspx

   "Hi all, Blake Ross here. Alex asked me to guest write a post this week because he's a fan of the Firefox project, which I cofounded. Before Firefox, I worked at Netscape throughout high school on its 6.x and 7.x releases. It was my first experience in a professional programming shop.

   I'm writing this now from my therapist's couch.