Recreating macOS’s Drift Screensaver with Rust and WASM

Hit "C" to bring up the control panel which, btw, is written in Elm!

I guess screensavers are something for nineties nostalgics nowadays, because no screensaver can be as battery friendly as turning the screen off completely. Ok, maybe you can enable the screensaver only when your laptop is on AC power, but that's one extra configuration step that not many make...

The older ones are pretty lightweight shaders, and don't seem to tax the machine that much. Drift would heat up my Intel Mac pretty quickly though (~70c, 80c if connected to an external monitor), but presumably only because the iGPU was struggling. I'd be curious to profile the official program and see what's hogging the GPU so much...

Even though running a screensaver on battery seems ridiculous at first, it might be cool to try to come up with a battery friendly design. It might need laptop screen hw that works in ambient light without backlight and changes patterns very slowly.

On a tangent and not really related, but I noticed the port of the ATV screensaver Aerial for Windows would tax my PC somewhat and cause the fans to spin up :-)

I think it did on the Mac too - but don’t quote me…

What’s your GPU? My phone can handle the demo without freaking out so I find it hard to understand why a PC would take half its available GPU compute to do the same.

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.

I think the intent was not only to not do harm, but to undo the burn-in caused when the screen is on by cycling each pixel on and off. (Early CRT monitors used to have a “memory” of what was on there before, similar to the artifacts left behind after e-ink screens are cleared)

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.

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 :-)

Prior to the mid-1990's, blanking the screen simply meant painting the screen black in software. Later video cards would allow you to turn off the video signal and monitors would blank if they lost the signal. However, this would only work if both ends supported power saving modes. Otherwise the electronics (including the picture tube) for the monitor would operate normally. The only other option was to turn off the monitor manually or, on machines with an integrated monitor, to turn the brightness down.

If the monitor is going to be on anyway, why wouldn't people want to display something interesting on it?

a) Entertainment

b) Fun

I had 2 requirements starting out:

1. It absolutely had to run in the browser. 2. I wanted the option of shipping native binaries later on, e.g. screensavers

This narrows the choice to something that can compile to WASM and has bindings for WebGL/OpenGL. Rust has substantial support for these technologies, there's an active graphics community, and, personally, it felt approachable for someone without experience with C/C++.

Also, I write Haskell/Elm for a living. I don't need much convincing to pick up another typed, memory-safe language.

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.

I want AfterDark science graph generator.

Can’t speak to the vectors themselves but the colors on macOS are derived from your desktop image

Doesn't look like typical CFD/ODE sims but somebody more experienced in shaders can comment below

https://github.com/sandydoo/flux/tree/main/flux/shaders

My guesses based on intuition:

1) Colors are set based on desktop wallpaper chosen by the user automatically

2) The little lines never cross at more than slightly more than parallel in the real one, but they sometimes do here

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.