Marcin Wichary: Go to Settings > Accessibility > Zoom, and then turn on “Use scroll gesture with modifier keys to zoom.” […] I’d also recommend turning off “Smooth images” under “Advanced…” so you see individual pixels better[…] Over the years, I found this feature very useful to inspect various misalignments, to check visual details, and […]

Marcin Wichary: Why is there a short wait if you press a button on your headphone remote or your AirPods to pause the music? Because the interface has to let a bit of time pass to figure out if you’re going to press the button again, making it a double press (advance to next track) […]

Richard Moss, back in 2010:

John Calhoun’s Glider games hold a special place in the history of Mac gaming, acting almost as an icon of the platform through much of the 1990s. They spawned a hugely dedicated fan base, which produced a ridiculous amount of original content both for and about Glider — especially Glider 4 and Glider PRO, the later versions.

I caught up with Calhoun over email recently, and quizzed him on the origins and development of the series. This is the first part of that interview. Read on to discover where the idea for Glider originated, how the game came to exist, and how it dramatically altered Calhoun’s future.

Here’s the updated working link to part 2 of the interview, and to Moss’s feature story, “Dreaming of a Thousand-Room House: The History and Making of Glider”. The links to those pages in part 1 of the interview are both out of date and result in 404s.

Moss, of course, is the author of the excellent book The Secret History of Mac Gaming, which features an entire chapter on Calhoun and Glider, aptly titled “Quintessentially Mac”.

John Calhoun, on Bluesky (and also a new blog):

I re-made Glider some years back for MacOS/iOS. It broke at some point (perhaps an Apple change for Retina displays?) so I pulled it from the App Store.

(Claude looked at the code — found some minor coordinate issues. Thanks!) Glider Classic for MacOS is back on.

11 years between version 1.0.4 and yesterday’s 1.1 looks like a long time. But when you consider that Calhoun shipped the original Glider back in 1988, that puts things in perspective. If you’ve never used Glider, it remains an all-time great procrastination utility. There aren’t many Mac apps still in development from that era.

(Calhoun, you will recall, in addition to making a slew of early Mac games, went on to a long career as an engineer at Apple, where, amongst other things, he worked on Preview for many years. He now makes cool personal projects like SystemSix and this excellent model of the Pan Am Orion that was in some old movie.)

The Playlist:

The first pitch, he said, goes back to 2008, and it was already pretty radical by Bond standards. “I had pitched in 2008 the idea to Barbara Broccoli of a parallel franchise,” Soderbergh said. “Set in the ’60s, R-rated, violent, sexy. Fictional backstory to real historical events, different actor, different universe.” [...]

That version was designed to open up a different, more lo-fi, stripped-down, and cost-effective way of making Bond movies, but not a replacement for them. “[It would be] cheaply made, where you get people like me, who are interested in that approach to do one of these things,” Soderbergh explained. “It’s just another lane that exists totally separate from the normal Bond movies.”

Broccoli and company, he said, were at least open enough to hear it out. “They were intrigued,” Soderbergh said. “But didn’t move forward.”

This hurts — it hurts to ponder what could have been.