11 items tagged “mac”
2024
The original WWW proposal is a Word for Macintosh 4.0 file from 1990, can we open it? (via) In which John Graham-Cumming attempts to open the original WWW proposal by Tim Berners-Lee, a 68,608 bytes Microsoft Word for Macintosh 4.0 file.
Microsoft Word and Apple Pages fail. OpenOffice gets the text but not the formatting. LibreOffice gets the diagrams too, but the best results come from the Infinite Mac WebAssembly emulator.
If you have had any prior experience with personal computers, what you might expect to see is some sort of opaque code, called a “prompt,” consisting of phosphorescent green or white letters on a murky background. What you see with Macintosh is the Finder. On a pleasant, light background (you can later change the background to any of a number of patterns, if you like), little pictures called “icons” appear, representing choices available to you.
— Steven Levy, in 1984
2022
Mac OS 8 emulated in WebAssembly (via) Absolutely incredible project by Mihai Parparita. This is a full, working copy of Mac OS 8 (from 1997) running in your browser via WebAssembly—and it’s fully loaded with games and applications too. I played with Photoshop 3.0 and Civilization and there’s so much more on there to explore too—I finally get to try out HyperCard!
2008
sfical.py. Neat idea: write a CGI script that turns a proprietary API (in this case the SalesForce events API) in to standard ical format, then run it on your Mac’s local Apache server and subscribe to it from iCal.
iTimeMachine. Enables Time Machine to see network drives (a ReadyNAS NV+ for example). There’s also a defaults setting but it didn’t seem to work; this did.
MacHeist Bundle. Everything’s now unlocked, meaning you can pick up TaskPaper, CSSEdit, Snapz Pro X (excellent for screencasts) and Pixelmator for $49.
2007
BBC iPlayer now supports streaming Flash for Mac and Linux. Absolutely fantastic—it Just Works, you hit the homepage and you can be watching video in seconds. No need to even sign up for an account. I imagine IP ranges are used to block access from outside the UK.
The Tale of the Mechanical Virus. “What I had discovered, in essence, was a mechanical virus. It infects Mac laptops and speads via the DVI adapters.”—I really hope this isn’t why my DVI adapter is on the blink.
Thoughts on (and pics of) the original Macintosh User Manual. “[I] was struck by how it had to explain a total paradigm shift in interacting with computers”.
PostgreSQL for Mac (via) Looks like a great way of getting PostgreSQL up and running on a Mac.
2006
So long Safari?
All browsers have bugs—especially relating to fancy JavaScript stuff. Any truly complex web application is likely to run in to browser bugs, and fixing them takes a whole bunch of time. Bugs in IE and Firefox are pretty well understood, as are the workarounds for them.
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