Recreating the Flying Toasters screen saver for the Vision Pro | Hacker News Reader

Recreating the Flying Toasters screen saver for the Vision Pro

abhipray.com

160 pointsbayeng132 comments

The original Flying Toasters may be the classic, but the singing Flying Toasters from After Dark 3.2 will always have a special place in my heart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjlusi_h_XA

Flying out of the sun / The smell of toast is in the air / When there's a job to be done / The flying toasters will be there.

And it's flap! Flap! Flap! / Now help is on the way. / This vict'ry song they sing:

We pop up to save the day / On mighty toaster wings!

Something kicked in my memory when I started that video and for a second I couldn't temember properly if I was hearing the Flying Toasters song or Ever Onward IBM [0]. I remember having a DOS program with a PC Speaker karaoke version of that song, maybe on a disk that also included Alley Cat by IBM too.

  0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9oh3gqOEKU

Couldn't help noticing the app size is ~150MB - not sure if this is something you can avoid, or if maybe all AVP apps automatically include a lot of extra cruft, but it feels like surely an app this simple shouldn't have to be that big?

Just as interesting, what were the requirements for the original screensaver? Certainly it ran on Windows 3.0. How many floppy disks did it come on? How much RAM did it use? It almost certainly has to be less than 1MB, probably much less. Looks like it ran on 10 MHz 80286's:

https://lowendmac.com/2007/how-after-dark-came-to-windows/

Thinking about it a little more, I suppose for something like the flying toasters, the toasters were probably like 50x50 px sprites. 8 bit color per pixel. Maybe 10 frames of animation. So 25 kB, and add 5 kB for the toast sprites. And then 2 kB for the code, gives 32 kB for just the flying toasters. So ~40 different screen savers could fit on a floppy.

After Dark 1.0 for Windows comes on a single floppy and is 716k in total, compressed, before installation. After installation, the 34 different screen saver modules take up roughly 650k in total, for an average of about 19k per module.

TOASTERS.AD is one of the more advanced ones and is roughly 27k, so your guess is pretty close!

Could be really bloated assets. Or really bloated tracking sdks. I see this a lot with spammy iOS apps, size is either a handful of megabytes or hundreds.

> maybe all AVP apps automatically include a lot of extra cruft

I'm making a simple physics playground app for the vision pro and it clocks in at 7.8 MB total in the app store.

Granted, my app doesn't have any assets in it unlike this one. So maybe vision pro assets are heavy for some reason.

> Initially, my plan was to employ gaze tracking to identify moments when a user might be “zoned out”. Due to privacy considerations, Apple restricts access to such sensor data.

First thing I see here, again, Apple with, here is a great bit of hardware, but you can only use it in the 3 ways we thought of, nothing else is valid.

I get your point, but this feels like an odd place to make it. The idea that all application developers could examine, record, analyse, and eventually abuse something as personal as your gaze tracking data is truly terrifying, and the fact that Apple doesn't allow it is something that makes me feel more comfortable buying a headset of theirs that has the feature in the first place.

Are you saying you are OK with Apple themselves being privy to this information? Honestly, I'm not sure I find their access to it any less terrifying.

Well, if I don't trust them at all with it, then I simply wouldn't buy the headset (it's inoperable without it).

But at the moment, one of the biggest selling points for Apple is privacy and the responsible handling of your data, so out of most other similar organisations I believe they have an immense financial incentive to safeguard the data. And I think their actions so far speak to this being a critical strategy to the success of their business.

Regardless, whether or not I trust Apple with it, it's certainly a lot easier to trust just Apple, rather than Apple plus hundreds/thousands/hundreds of thousands of others whose incentives are much less clearly aligned.

Flying Toasters are great and everything, but can somebody recreate the Opus 'n Bill screensaver?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IP26kghndkE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DywBp3U2hQ

FTA...

"Check out the app previews and screenshots on the app store to get a visual: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flying-toasters/id6479964879 "

I highly recommend watching the video on that link to the app store. The dev did a nice job.

And the sleeping cat has no idea what's going on right behind it!

Very nice, though the categorisation as a “Productivity” app is maybe questionable… :-)

Tangential to this, but I don’t really see any discussion about Vision Pro since launch. Is it dead on arrival?

it might seem silly, but this “flying toaster” sort of thing was exactly the type of first apps being developed for the iphone. we know what eventually happened. so time will tell.

The iPhone was already a smashing success before third-party apps (jailbroken ones included) were ever developed.

It took the Newton to get there, though. Vision Pro may be this generation's Newton, perhaps. Time will tell, indeed.

> The iPhone was already a smashing success before third-party apps (jailbroken ones included) were ever developed.

Source for this? It wasn't until a few generations in that the iPhone really took off. Yes there were die-hard supporter and people who loved it from day 1 but people always pretend the iPhone was destined to be what it is today at launch and that was not at all the impression I had living through it.

> Source for this?

A what? What does source mean in this context?

Regardless, the Vision Pro needs to sell approximately an order of magnitude more units in the next couple of months to catch up with the iPhone 1.

>we know what eventually happened.

So what you are saying is that I need to develop an app which is just a ruby and when you touch it, it displays the following text

I am rich

I deserv [sic] it

I am good,

healthy & successful

Hmm wonder what would be the good price for such an app? I guess $999.99 will have to do.

A lot of the articles so far are speculating it's mostly a technology demonstrator, or close to a dev kit.

Everyone seems to agree it's mighty impressive, but not quite there yet.

Gen 2 or Gen 3 will surely be cheaper, lighter and better, and somewhere along there I'm betting we'll see iPhone levels of adoption.

Gen 1 iPad was a bit meh. Thick, heavy, didn’t do much. Kinda just a tech demo for a large very-responsive touchscreen device.

Gen 2 was so perfect that they sold it for years and years, and launched a related product line based on its platform (the Mini).

Same story for the iPod, same story for the MacBook Air, same story for the iPhone.

I think we'll see the same story play out once there are a few "killer" apps for it, and some of the features are refined (pass through sharpness, for example), and it gets a bit cheaper.

iPod gen 1 was awesome.

I agree, but with Firewire only and no Windows support, it was not a big seller.

Yes, I even remember everybody saying that tablets will never be used because of the gorilla arm (?) effect, that you can't hold your hand long time up. But now I see a young generation using exclusively tablets. Also the first iPhone, was looked at strangely. I remember being ashamed of using one. Internet was slow. We will know only in hindsight. I have no idea about the future of VR. I see the use-cases, but let's see.

It's grounded on launch with it's own concrete shoes.

Apple released a VR headset that you can't use to play video games or watch porn with, and priced it at ~2-6x the price of competitive hardware.

You can watch porn all you want, and it costs less than Microsoft HoloLens did.

(Similar to Bing where Bing Maps is worse than Apple Maps, but nobody reported on it because nobody remembers it exists.)

It may well become more successful in some niche market than HoloLens (another niche product) too. But it's not a serious consumer product at $3500 (just kidding, better upgrade that non-upgradeable storage from the 0.25TB, so at least $3700) unless it can, at bare minimum, replace another expensive device (iPhone or Mac) while also doing those things better. Or if some killer app is developed. Which I wouldn't hold my breath too hard for based on their relationship with developers. A killer app like: multiple sports league partnerships which allow you to strap on AVP and be courtside/front row/etc at every game for some monthly subscription -- and all your friends who are also watching the same game are visble and audible via their Personas like they're right next to you. Suddenly, when compared to season tickets or going to 10 games a year, AVP looks great. But I am not necessarily confident that something like this will emerge for this product. Because a lot of content related stuff, which is the only 'proven' consumer use for VR, is dependent on getting content owners to play ball, and content owners don't want to help cement Apple into a dominant position in yet another industry, after seeing how cutthroat their behavior is in music and smartphone apps.

> But it's not a serious consumer product

That's why it's called Vision Pro.

And Apple today added support for spatial personas allowing developers to create the experience you are talking about:

https://www.uploadvr.com/apple-vision-pro-spatial-personas-l...

I'm aware that they intend this to be a beachhead for a future Vision Amateur or whatever which I assume will be $1500 (with trash specs, $1700 with passable ones).* However, they won't be able to sell them if developers don't embrace it. That particular egg in my humble opinion needs to be in place before the chicken of adoption will hatch.

I believe the only way Apple will make that happen is a radical change in attitude toward developers. They would need to court developers of games and owners of content and negotiate -- generously -- on terms, instead of dictating terms and clinging to the 100% control and 30% revshare they feel so deserving of.

We'll see in a couple years if I'm right!

* Honestly though, still, even at that price, can you imagine most people being eager to add another almost-$2000 device to their lives that doesn't replace another one, unless the device does some serious life-improving stuff? And I don't see how the price gets any lower than that, even if Apple budged on margins which is very out of character.

But not VR optimized ones. GP’s not talking about flat stuff. HoloLens was also DOA for different reasons(chiefly narrow FOV I think)

Is that an accurate way of characterizing it? I've understood The Apple Vision to be augmented reality headset, not a virtual reality headset -- that Apple intends it to be used for applications more like HoloLens was envisioned for, rather than what Quest, Index, or PSVR are currently used for.

The hololens isnt used for anything, the only mainstream uses are games and pornography

They can call it an AR headset all they want but the thing they shipped is a vr headset with pass through

Why not? Users are going to love AR adaptation of Genshin or VRChat, and Apple sure is going to do everything they could to stop it, probably up to furry-washing it.

You can play all sorts of video games from Apple Arcade, XBox/PS5, Mac, PC etc.

There's loads of options courtesy of apps like MirrorPlay.

And this is the Vision Pro not Vision. So the mainstream price will be significantly cheaper.

Are the games 2D or 3D? I'm not a big gamer but I'm curious.

Almost everything is 2D because of the iPad support.

There are some launch 3D games but most are being built/ported right now.

Yeah.

Basically you can use it as an TV and that’s about it. The gesture interface is incompatible with any efficient data manipulation and the screen underperforms compared to a computer monitor.

Unlike the iPhone Apple can’t simply software patch or enable an App Store to fix these issues.

What are you basing this on?

I bought and returned one.

It works with Bluetooth keyboards and trackpads.

It's got its use cases that don't align with the kind of topics here, so it's not discussed. Doesn't make it dead, just unpopular with the HN crowd. Maybe even fair to say unpopular with the mainstream crowd. But so was the first, Mac-only iPod, and here we are. I have one. I use it every day for a handful of things, but I don't come on here and talk about it.

It’s pretty dead :/

But I think this was the classic strategy of pricing out everyone except for those who will build on it or be excited by it, then make a polished v2 with wider appeal once there’s content.

I would counter that people adopted iPods en masse a lot faster than they will ever adopt a VR headset. VR is only ever going to be a niche use case. I think those use cases in entertainment realm are the only use cases that could get wide adoption and even then its someone wearing it for 1-2 hours.

I think this might suffer from a product class that needs widespread adoption to fund development in order to get smaller form factors and it will never get the widespread adoption.

I agree that the iPod was adopted faster, but that definitely wasn't version 1, and the early versions were heavily mocked before they were adopted. It was too expensive, it was Mac only, it used FireWire, which was not widely available, things like that. Not the challenges that the Vision Pro (and VR) will face, but still challenges. Apple figured out how to get Windows support, then how to shrink the form factor when it made sense. I imagine they'll do that again.

FireWire was very widely available on Macs of the era, which is why it made sense amongst other things. (USB 1.1 is very slow, FireWire could also provide power, Apple invented FireWire)

Also worth noting: when the iPod came out, iTunes had been around for a while. Many people had a decent music library on the Mac (from ripping CDs or Napster), and with the iPod, you just plugged it in, and within minutes you had the entire library in your pocket to go, including metadata (playlists, play counts, etc.).

It was pretty convenient, and very well executed.

My Mac keyboard had broken the day I got my iPod. I was able to dock my iPod, sync up my huge collection of music in a few minutes and then head out with my new iPod to buy a cheap replacement keyboard.

That's a great story! Very "modern living".

iTunes had been around for a while if you consider SoundJam MP as part of the iTunes legacy. It memory and a quick Google search serve, iTunes was about a year and a half old when the iPod came out. I guess that's old for CD-distribution days.

Yeah but Macs were pretty close to the bottom of their popularity in 2001 and Firewire was near non-existant on PC. It was really only a high-end PC thing or maybe an add-on for those FW capable camcorders. When the iPod launched USB 2.0 was already out, available on okayish PCs (not Macs yet though) and was pretty much fast enough as was seen with later USB 2.0 capable iPods.

The best part about FireWire (from the perspective of someone who never actually used it) was that it was very tolerant of uneven voltages; thus, all iPods that could use it (which went at least through the first Nanos) had very, very inexpensive car power adapters - they could just use the "12V" that's really more like 13.4 V. No real circuitry inside, just a cord to plug into the iPod.

I knew a lot of people who bought the original iPod.

And every single one justified it with it being a high-quality 5GB hard drive that just happened to play music.

It definitely wasn’t this breakout music player hit.

People who spent the money on a Vision Pro are the most likely people to try to convince others it's some amazing future device...

VR has been around for years and years, and still has not become mainstream. The core issues remain, and Apple did nothing to resolve them - nor do I suspect they are capable of resolving them.

Untold fortunes have been thrown down the VR rabbit hole by some of the most heavily invested companies, and still today it's a mediocre experience after the novelty wears off.

Have you tried it? The claim that they haven’t fixed any of the core issues is legitimately strange.

The screens inside as a significant jump in image quality, to the point that for a single TV/movie watcher, the Vision Pro is probably going to be the best device for that media. As the price comes down and the inevitable screen sharing becomes possible, it will be the best for multiple people, too.

Eye tracking and pinch to click is also a big jump in usability. That, along with the excellent pass through, makes it way more comfortable to use in public.

There are a lot of features that will make it better in the future, like less weight, even better screens, better battery life, etc., but to claim Apple didn’t fix any core problems with the current device is uninformed.

At my work, I've had the opportunity to work with several headsets of different flavours, and eye tracking and pinch to click is not an Apple innovation. It was definitely in the Quest Pro, and possibly some others (its been a while since I worked in that department). When I first got to mess with it, I very quickly knocked up a demo of a huge pair of eyes looking at you that matched the rotation of your actual eyes, which is a surprisingly creepy effect

Yes, it's strange hearing Vision Pro proponents claim it's miles better than the competition. It's like they haven't actually used the competition...

And no, Apple has not solved the main issues with VR. Motion sickness, and clumsiness of having a weight hang off the front of your face.

I can't comment on whether the quality of the features (display, interaction, tracking etc) are any better than the competitors, but the existence of those features is not innovative in itself. They're an iteration, and from what I hear, not necessarily a large one

> I agree that the iPod was adopted faster, but that definitely wasn't version 1, and the early versions were heavily mocked before they were adopted.

"No Wireless. Less Space than a Nomad. Lame." [0]

[0] https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...

The iPod weighed a pound and fit in your pocket. The Vision Pro is worn on your face and covers your eyes. Humans are one of the species of animal that hates things covering their faces and eyes.

the switch to iPod from Walkman/Discman was as obvious as VHS to DVD. it was something everybody wanted even if they didn't know it until they were shown the new thing. not everybody wants knowingly or not a VR headset. that's not a solve of an everyday problem for anybody but a fraction of people.

I didn’t mean to center it on HN. I simply don’t see it discussed anywhere even though it was front and center on most social media feeds. Discussion of it vanished seemingly within a week.

I've been using it daily, it's excellent. I'm on a trip and don't have access to it and I'm seriously missing it.

I guess Adam Savage thinks it's one of the better ways to experience movies.

Absolutely. It's also a good work tool - in certain cases I prefer it to multiple monitors as I usually work. You get full focus in the environment as well.

Dune part 1 in 3D blew my mind. IMHO.

Even for 2D movies, I no longer bother with my big screen tv.

I don’t see any discussion of Apple products at all on here outside of the reveal.

You must not consider the App Store an Apple product??

Everything that can be said about it already has been.

Right now, just gota wait for 3rd gen for the real stuff to happen.

Similar story with Quest, 1 was ok but 3rd gen is actually great.

I want to recreate the windows Maze screensaver in VR... but with the animated fractal textures on walls, floor and ceiling.

That sounds oddly terrifying. Like gray goo devouring the world.

I'm not sure if you can change the textures but there is Screensavers VR - https://store.steampowered.com/app/881670/Screensavers_VR/

that's only a few elements away from a 'Serial Experiments: Lain' episode.

My favourite screensaver was a mac app I installed around 2009, it would randomly show a BSOD. Was quite the novelty at the time, given the laptop only really crashed twice in the 4 years I had it and then had to give it back to the department.

Sounds like the BSOD screensaver included in XScreenSaver, which you can still install today: https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/screenshots/

It actually fooled me once when it happened to choose a MacOS crash screen while I was in the bathroom.

This link doesn't go to a screenshot of a BSOD - it goes to a picture that disses (insults) HackerNews folks (https://cdn.jwz.org/images/2024/hn.png). Was this on purpose?

Based on the rest of the comment I'm guessing you pasted the wrong link?

If not - congrats on the successful Rick Rolling (or whatever it's called)

No, that's probably the correct link, but jwz doesn't like the HN crowd and filters for referers.

That's the level of petty I aspire to, but don't have the energy to deliver on.

just imagine the hours that someone spent making that unsettling image.

if someone found a way to turn spite into electricity, we would never need to build another power plant.

Spite is the greatest motivator. Many a book have I finished reading because damn it, I'm not folding.

rideontime's link is cromulent; jwz does that if you follow it from HN.

Copy the link and open it in a new tab. Works fine.

lmao I forgot he did that with the referrer, that rules. I think it used to be goatse.

There is one from MS too.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/blu...

OT: check out my annoying screensaver based on the bouncing DVD logo. https://github.com/pryelluw/mac-dvd-screensaver

This bring back memories of AfterDark. They had other screen savers in the software package, but this was definitely the most whimsical.

The Star Trek AfterDark screensaver was the jam! Tribbles https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdQ_ekXdoqU

This is hypnotic. Literally put me to sleep

This makes me feel old.

Number of things that need explaining now:

   - Computers used analog CRT monitors
   - CRTs had burn-in if left static
   - Screen savers showed dynamic images
   - After Dark / flying toasters was a classic screensaver
   - Software was sold on floppy disks
   - Purchased at physical computer stores
   - After Dark-era floppy disks were hard, not floppy
   - "Screen Savers" is also not to be confused with the TechTV show
   - TechTV merged with G4 in 2004, then closed in 2014, then restarted in 2020, then reclosed in 2022

I think that brings us back to modern times.

Also, has anyone recreated Snake for the AVP yet? And I don't mean fancy-Snake: I mean Nokia Snake.

- “G4” the TV network, not to be confused with the series of Mac computers

- People didn’t care about power usage as much

Also, with OLED monitor screens becoming more popular maybe they will make a comeback? My OLED TV has a screensaver.

The small floppy disks were still floppy disks. Thick plastic does not make a hard disc!

While we’re going down memory lane, I wish someone would recreate, reimagine, or make a sequel to Johnny Castaway.

mumble mumble mumble hEEEEEEEE

I'd love to see a full port of XScreenSaver to VR platforms. It has its own variation on flying toasters (https://youtu.be/mLGDvtbFvfg) along with many, many other modules.

Can you explain the desire? Is it just nostalgia? I just don't understand the need for a screensaver for a VR device. Do people idle long enough with the VR device worn for a screensaver to come on?

In addition to their functional purposes, screensavers are aesthetically pleasing, and experiencing them in 360° immersion for short periods of time is something some people would enjoy. Perhaps there's a novelty factor here, i.e. a desire to experience familiar things in a new context, but I don't see where nostalgia would apply, other than to the flying toasters imagery specifically.

I was just thinking about MOPy fish (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOPy_fish)...and how much it encouraged wasting paper!

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOPy_fish

<link fixed>

I love that it's in the "Productivity" category in the App Store.

A missing feature of the App Store is that it does not support screen savers. You can only download an app that spits out a screen saver. I would love the ability to download free and paid screensavers from the App Store that are sandboxed and would update automatically.

How can it be that apple makes its own screen savers so prominent each year, yet doesn’t support screen savers in the App Store?

This is exactly the kind of first apps developed for devices. Since history repeats, I'm waiting for my Vision miner headlamp.

Definitely a 1.0 product in the graphics, but I love the whole concept of a murmuration of flying toasters in my living room. More whimsy like this, please.

Yep, I wanted to get something out there and iterate based on feedback. Would love to hear suggestions!

Maybe some sort of cube mapping on the toasters to give them a reflective metallic look will make them blend with the environment more, situating them in the space and harkening to the original

(The APIs don’t let you use the actual environment for reflections, right?)

Thank you for the recommendation! I applied a "Physically Based" material to the toasters, setting the "metallic" attribute to its maximum value. The app preview/screenshots might not fully showcase the potential metallic appearance, which depends on the lighting conditions and the selection of the right emissive color. I'll experiment some more to enhance its reflectiveness under a broader range of conditions.

| (The APIs don’t let you use the actual environment for reflections, right?) That's a good point..I don't know the answer to your question but maybe I just need to add a light source in the virtual world.

The video on the App Store seems to show the toasters glitching out and rotating randomly. I think it's when they interact with each other.

I definitely appreciated (and still do!) having my mind blown as a kid by the sheer sense of humor that developers have.

It feels like we lost many subtlely important things in the drive starting in the 2000s to "clean up" software and their development.

too many cooks (and too much money) in the kitchen

The youtube video linked has the toasters going north west to south east - they canonically travel from north east to south west. Did they flip the video to avoid a copyright claim?

I would get this just to keep jumping through the portals and chilling in the toasterverse. Looking forward to what else the dev has in store!

Shout out to the author, Bill Stewart.

https://uxfactor.ca/1151/

Bill Stewart was by no means the author of after dark or the flying toasters[1] He did do the windows port of the screen saver engine and some modules, but that was years after they'd first shipped as part of the Mac version of After Dark.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Dark_(software)

Apple already recreated Dinosaur Adventure 3D, sort of

Voodoo Lights was my go to back in the day

All that effort, only to use a disgusting AI-generated app icon. That's a shame.

They're a developer making a cutesy little nostalgia toy, not an artist. I'm sure they'd be ecstatic for you to donate a couple hundred for them to hire a professional humam?

In the interim, this works fine and looks better than what most developers can make themselves.

Personally speaking, I think ugly programmer art is better-looking than an AI icon. Even if it was a two-tone vector silhouette of a slice of bread, it would be more evocative and readable to me.

The app is theirs, and they should feel proud enough to make an original icon for it too. I agree with the parent, the AI-generated icon would be the first thing stopping me from spending $1.99 on this.

I'd rather see an mspaint drawing.

Agreed. The toaster is made of a loaf of bread? And the slots are sideways.

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