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Comment by unfunco | Hacker News Reader

I used to use Disco, the website is still alive: https://discoapp.com

When a CD was burning, smoke would emanate from the app, and if you blew on your microphone the smoke would disperse.

Blowing the smoke away is a great touch.

I miss that kind of thing - the closest we get nowadays is when things bounce or shake a little bit as you interact with them.

I guess this is what Gruber was talking about recently - stuff that wouldn't go on a spreadsheet of features but make you want to use the app just because it does stuff like this.

Another similar example, blowing into the microphone would spin the title name around on 3ds games (and poking/blowing at random things in game would sometimes do fun stuff too!)

Those tiny details and fun little things here and there are what people remember in 10-20 years. I wish developers did them more

I suspect these things happened because of waterfall development style. If you finish the product with time before the launch date, you can add in some fun.

Now, everyone uses Agile-ish, and software is NEVER finished. You always have a backlog. Those are always going to be more important to your PM than an Easter Egg.

Similarly, there used to be a haxie[0] that could hook Carbon apps and make it so if there were any progress bars in a window, once the progress bar reached 100% progress the "water" in it would begin to overflow and fill the window. Completely pointless but fun.

[0]: A formalized way to distribute code injection hacks for the purpose of user customization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsanity

is the website still alive? getting a bad certificate and if I push past it I get a "Coming Soon"

I guess a mac only application for disk burning becomes a bit pointless when there’s no macs with disc drives any more.

Not entirely pointless. You can connect an external optical drive even to most modern of macs and it'll work. That contraption consisting of a full-size DVD drive and a SATA-USB adapter with external power, plugged into a USB-A/USB-C adapter and then my M1 macbook, for that one time when I was given a CD and was curious to see what's on it? It worked flawlessly. Though I've never tried burning discs on macOS, I don't see a reason why it shouldn't work.

Unless you have a Pioneer drive and macOS 13.2

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/macos-13-2-breaks-compa...

Burning discs, even from an M1 Mac, works just fine. I burned a CD just the other day.

there’s no macs with disc drives any more

The drives still exist. They're just optional now. Like bucket seats.

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MD564LL/A/apple-usb-super...

Best optical drive I own. When nothing else will read a crusty disc, the SuperDrive always does.

Fun fact. That's the oldest product they still sell as it was introduced with the original MacBook Air in 2008. They've done literally nothing to it and it sill comes with a USB A cable despite most of their computers not having one at all. It also is pretty bad value these days when a Blu-ray writer costs about the same.

It depends on what you're using it for. I have a couple of Blu-Ray drives, and they're much more finicky than the SuperDrive.

When a disc won't read or write in my Pioneer drive, I try it in my no-name Blu-ray drive, and when that fails, I try it in the SuperDrive, and it always works.

I consider something that works reliably 99% of the time to be a better value than something that works 80% of the time.

I'd wager they are just selling whatever inventory they have yet, and it'll never get a USB-C refresh.

I have an external BDXL burner sitting on top of my Mac Studio. It’s a real shame they couldn’t find space internally for such a thing.

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