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Comment by aresant | Hacker News Reader

This is awesomely reminiscent of the old school 68k macintosh era - dogcow, oscar the grouch in the trash can, etc

I miss that simplicity / playfulness / aesthic of that era (yes I am old, please get off my lawn)

One of my first memories is of my dad showing me how Oscar the Grouch was in his Mac trash can, and sang, “I love trash!” when he put something in there. Haven’t thought of that in many years, but it was the first thing I thought of when I saw this.

I vaguely recall a LiteStep theme for Windows back in the day that did something like this -- hadn't heard of it as a Mac feature before!

Even well into the PPC era Classic Mac OS carried that culture of fun third party software. Can't remember its name, but for example in the late 90s/early 00s I ran across an extension that gave dragged icons gravity and momentum, allowing the user to "throw" them around their desktop. No practical purpose, just fun.

Arguably the Kaleidoscope fits into this category too. While there were tame themes for it that did more tame things like make your Mac look like Windows/BeOS/NeXTSTEP/etc, many third party Kaleidoscope schemes skewed more whacky and fun than your average theme software. Ever wanted your desktop to look like a pair of jeans[0], a dwarven forge[1], 2D top-down space shooter[2], or cute cartoon jungle[3]? Kaleidoscope has you covered.

[0]: https://i.ibb.co/x1YsFqt/denim-scheme-dtdenimsit-vbpf.png [1]: https://i.ibb.co/fdXKKV2/eritis-forge-2-eitrisforge2sit-p5vq... [2]: https://i.ibb.co/TryF6VQ/boilerplatetm-boilerplatesit-vrao.p... [3]: https://i.ibb.co/cCLYpKL/monkeyparadise-monkeyparadisesit-ss...

> Even well into the PPC era Classic Mac OS carried that culture of fun third party software.

Apple knew it lived and died by third party developer adoption.-

(Now is all "app stores", walled gardens and "where is our 30%", first and foremost ...)

If you’re still on a recent macOS, check out the page setup dialog in any app with printing.

(She’s still there, doing flips and precision bitmap alignment)

Wow, I had to check a lot more apps before I found one that used the standard page setup. I eventually relented and opened Pages — for anyone who wishes to bypass all that hunting around!

Actual flips? If so, that's an easter egg I didn't manage to trigger.

That is also an era filled with exploration and iteration. Althought we still explore a lot nowadays, but the vibe is quite different.

(I am afraid AIs will do most of the "exploration" for us, this days, sadly ...

... while we gladly just "prompt" - which, in itself, might be an exporatory technique. We'll see.-

Thanks for the memory of oscar rising up singing I...love...trash!

(hello, fellow old!)

I still wish Sesame Street would let me write a modern version of The Grouch. -Eric Shapiro

I feel like the constant upgrade cycle of OSes with API breaking changes around the OS's GUI layer has a tendency to kill off most of these playful apps.

TL;DR: playfulness is killed by the arms race of constantly upgrading to the latest version of everything.

You very well could be right. On a "systemic" sense, in order to devote effort to these whimsical things, you needed stability "everywhere else" ...

I wrote a Norton-style drive activity monitor, if that’s the kind of thing you like - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/drivelight/id6446650999

Talking Moose!

Talking Moose, Kaleidoscope, Kilroy. So much fun and made your OS so unstable.

First rule of troubleshooting was always “turn off all extensions.” :)

Which is why now they are being migrated, one after the other, into userspace. :)

The Energizer Bunny too. You could install it on a lab full of machines, trigger it, and it would march from one to another, banging a drum the whole time.

Oscar! Thank you for the trip down the memory lane.

yes! I loved all the weird and funny easter eggs hidden in the OS. Magical time.

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