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Apple Businesses

MacHack Yields Clever Tricks With Apples 132

Posted by timothy from the gimp-on-os-x-counts-too dept.
gagganator writes: "Machack (that 72 hour nonstop hacking contest) has ended, and here are the hacks voted most interesting. also, Steve Wozniak spoke about everything from phone phreaking to the future of computing." Sounds like a fun event -- does anyone have any other first-hand stories about this year's Machack?
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MacHack Yields Clever Tricks With Apples More

MacHack Yields Clever Tricks With Apples

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  • Amiga will RISE AGAIN (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    As soon as the PowerPC Amiga comes out, we will CRUSH Microsoft and Apple! Already, my stock Amiga 1200 is roughly 6.7x faster than the current top-of-the-line Alpha or Itanium, right out of the box. And just try to get a Video Toaster for your puny Pentium 4. Can't do it. You just can't do it.

  • Re:Woz's speech ... and jokes (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I've been with Woz and Mitnick in the same room, on more then one ocassion, while I was down in LA. Did steve talk about how he pranked McDonalds by overriding their speaker system? Saying things like "You are too fat to eat one of our burgers" and things like that. An Old Woz Friend... who wishes to remain un-identified.

  • Woz's speech (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I don't know if they'll post in online, but Woz's speech was hilarious. He talked about the various practical jokes he's played on unwitting friends, family and coworkers. He even told a few Steve Jobs stories.

    But the best ones were how he tweaked secret service agents by buying 2 dollar bills in sheets and having a friend bind them into a pad and perforate them. Lots of people think they're counterfeit when he pays with them, but they're not!

    Actually, the other keynote speakers had some really good stories, too. All in all, it was probably the best keynote I've seen in the past few years.

    -D

  • At the time that was a very big deal- and it _did_ trigger an incredible explosion of consumer interest. I'd agree that Woz invented the personal computer. It was a hell of a big change from the Altair scene, which was really 'obsessive crazed hobbyist' land.

  • Woz stated that he did not think it was in Apple's best interest to buy NeXT at the time it did. He didn't feel that the operating system was Apple's problem.

    I'm flat out astonished that he could possibly have felt that way!

    Now, I was only vaguely aware of Apple's goings-on in the 90's (I went from Amiga to Linux and pretty much avoided Apple and Microsoft) but I do recall the endlessly "coming soon" next-generation OS. But I just recently read Jim Carlton's book "Apple", and was stunned by just how much time, how much money, how many completely abandoned efforts went into the quest for a "new" Mac OS before finally merging with NeXT. And even then several more years passed before OS X finally made it out.

    Now I can't guarantee that Carlton's book is an objective and unbiased account of the times. But based on that, I got the very strong impression that Apple were never going to successfully write a next-gen OS. If they had rejected NeXT (as they rejected Be..) I'm sure they would have gradually slid into bankruptcy (just as everyone predicted for so many years).

    I'd love to know what the Woz thinks would have happened between 1997 and now if Apple had decided it was "not in their best interests" to buy NeXT..?

  • This does not match with my Mac experience. 1 months after getting my first computer (that's of all time) I had figured out how to re-install the system and done so. "you have to set it up for her".. cause everyone has got an IT department in their basement.. I mean you have to install programs for her? good lord! and configure it! wow... Do you double click on the app and do dictation to? I know many people who can "use" computers this way.
  • Jeez, you sound like the executives in Dilbert who get stuck in a conference room and die because they get locked in and can't figure out how to use the telephone. Why not look through the menu choices and select "Eject" to remove the floppy? That you don't understand the trash can short cut doesn't excuse you from using the obvious solution and then engaging in sarcastic, pinheaded commentary.

    For those who want to know here is the historical reason for the trash can short cut. Apple introduced the ubiquitous 3-1/2" floppy disk to the world (it was made by Sony). They promised to make available an external floppy drive (this was before hard drives were readily available) but took forever because that would limit their ability to deliver computers. So the problem was how do you implement a GUI to move files from one floppy to another?

    Instead of completely removing a volume when it was ejected they left behind a grayed-out image. It was still possible to interact with this ghostly image and in particular you could drag an icon from an unmounted floppy to a mounted floppy. At that point the OS would eject floppies and request the other until the transfer was complete. When you were really done with a floppy you would drag the greyed-out image to the trash.

    The short cut became to drag a floppy to the trash so that it was ejected and and grayed-out image was also removed. For some mysterious reason this behavior was preserved for years before it finally became customary (with OS 8 or 9?) that ejecting a floppy would not leave behind the ghostly image. The transition phase couldn't have been more than a few months but the baggage remained for years. The damn short cut is still there in OSX!
  • While not amazingly funny, the above post seemed to be humor. If it wasn't clear at the beginning, the racism point sort of makes it obvious.

    Really guys, turn your clue detectors on.

  • Re:not to start a flame war... (Score:3)

    by MouseR ( 3264 ) on Monday June 25, 2001 @04:37AM (#130222) Homepage
    You have to go to the 'Start' button to shut the machine down

    That's because the shutdown sequence can take several minutes on an NT Server box. So, you "start" the shutdown service.

    Seriously, though, it's just shorter to just wait for the machine to crash.

    Karma karma karma karma karmeleon: it comes and goes, it comes and goes.
  • Yep, I'll bet there's a pinhole eject
    in every mmacine Apple's shipped with
    a floppy drive     this year. Uh-huh. Yep.
  • Wizardry...Dark Castle...hint hint, this was about 88-89. Such menu entries did not exist.

    System 2.0 / Finder 4.1 (April 1985)
    was the version that added the "Put Away" option
    to the Finder for unmounting disks,
    and the option to drag floppies to the trash to unmount.


    Ask a Mac enthusiast one question, he answers a different one than the one you asked...

    Yeah, but at least we know how to use a
    search engine to fact-check. ;)

  • It's not a metaphor.

    Way, way, back in the day, the original Mac only had a single 400kB floppy drive. If you had some cash, you could afford a second one. (and man, would you want it - copying floppies with the paltry amount of RAM in those things was hell otherwise)

    So it was customary to eject a disk you weren't using, but *leave* a copy of the icon on the system so that if it was needed it would simply prompt you for the appropriate disk to be inserted. This made sense at the time, honestly. The icons that were left were sort of dimmed, and when you wanted to get rid of them, you'd drag the dimmed icons to the trash. Ejecting the disk though, was done with a menu command.

    Some developer got tired of having to eject disks twice to get them completely off the system, so he wrote code that would eject a disk all the way if it were dragged to the trash. This conflicted with the UI, and the HCI people bitched about it, but it turned out that they used it just as much as everyone else, because it was frickin' useful.

    For years the idea of having an icon for eject on the desktop, or having the trash turn into one was bandied about. OS X actually implements this. (although it also conflicts with the icon = noun rule that has underlied GUIs for ages)

    Personally I would've just put on a software controllable eject button on the drives, that also sent an event to the OS. But that's just me.
  • What the heck has ESR got to do with the price of fish?
    --
    the telephone rings / problem between screen and chair / thoughts of homocide
  • ... running MandrakeUpdate on my server over ssh over airport through XDarwin on my Cube.

    Well, at least I thought it was neat..


    Your Working Boy,
    - Otis (GAIM: OtisWild)
  • there was a similar cornfusion when first learning win95, I wanted to remove an Icon from the desktop but it wasn't clear if clicking "delete" removed just the icon "shortcut" or the entire file!

  • Steve Wozniak, the man commonly credited with the invention of the personal computer,

    Wow, In the Wintel mass cult the $PC_CREATOR is Ed Roberts and his Altair kit/MITS BASIC (which was actually slyly owned by Micro-soft), or if your a classiccmp collector it's Edmund Berkeley and his "Simon" PC, altho Apple probably gets the blue ribbon if you limit "PC" to something you just buy, plug in, boot up and use, no assembly (haha) required.
  • Ahem, there is also an eject disk menu command.

    BAM!

    --
  • true .. but I nslookup'ed www.slashdot.org and slashdot.org, and got the same ip for both.
    *shrug*
    it seems to be working fine now =)
  • Hmm, too bad there was no way that I could have gotten to MacHack. Earlier this year I transplanted the ADB controller from one of those Apple mice shaped like that into a 3 button PS/2 mouse from Digital of about the same age. I also hacked up a copy of the Mouse Key control panel from Logitech so that Mouse Key would recognize the "new" three button mouse. I really only got away with it because both mice were manufactured by Logitech and their controllers both essentially had the same pin outs. I had to hack up Mouse Key because it was designed to only recognize ADB devices with certain ADB IDs, I just replaced the IDs for one of the Logitech mice with the ID from the Apple mouse. Oddly enough this was the hardest part. I did this all before I realized that I could have used the disassembler for ResEdit and it would have been easier. The only problem is that Mouse Key thinks that the right button is the middle button and the middle button the right. This is probably my fault, but I could easily fix that by using a different Logitech Mouse ID.

  • So now it's gone from entirely unintuitive to just being a "mystery meat" interface? Waving the disk icon around to try to find out where to put it is almost as annoying as the original behavior.

    Kudos to Woz for his hack and all, but this is something Apple should have done on their own at least 15 years ago. It's a tragedy that it hasn't been done by now, not a great hack.

    Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!

  • Ah, that's better then. I hadn't noticed this on the last Mac I played around with. Glad to see some thought's gone into the problem.

    Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!

  • Hrm... this guy is likely a win-head. Here's a good windows irratation... You have to go to the 'Start' button to shut the machine down. heh...
    -t
  • Or there is the pop-up menu option that will also do the job. Cick on a disk and you will see the 'eject' item just there to be selected.
  • I know some of us will be waiting to try some of the hacks. You know everyone will want to try Dock Dancer.

    So the Woz uses iCab. that makes sense. Of all the people in the computer world, he stands as one worth emulating. He has not forgotten that the computers most important element is the human using it.

  • If you drag an audio device to the hand do you get a "Talk to the Hand" message?
  • The Apple 1 was a fully-supported product, not a prototype or anything, and they sold 500, not 50. It's still a tiny run compared to anything modern, but it was big enough that a few people in most large cities had one, enabling users groups and such.

    http://applefritter.com/apple1/

  • ESR was one of the keynote speakers at last year's MacHack.
  • I agree, it may not be intuitive but when you're used it, it sorta makes sense. But for everyone else, I really don't think it's that hard to right-click (control-click if you use the mouse that comes with the machine) and choose "eject" or just go up to the file menu and choose eject... The people who complain about it probably haven't ever used it.
  • In all fairness, I wouldn't say Mac OS X is "brand new" - the BSD and NeXT underpinnings are pretty mature. At the same time, this isn't just another Linux distribution - the human interface components are quite new, so yes, growing pains should be expected in some areas. If the multitasking had been incomplete on release I'd be surprised, but I'm not surprised that CD-R and DVD support hasn't been completely tacked onto the lower-level OS components whose invention predate publically-accessible CD-Rs and DVDs.

    Besides, CD-R burning has never been a traditional OS component. Apple's only recently added it to iTunes, and only with the latest iMacs released their own software for burning non-audio CDs. Adaptec/Roxio Toast has been the standard for burning CD-Rs. At most, Apple may not have completely documented the API that Toast would need to access CD-Rs yet. Microsoft hasn't generally included their own CD burning software, either - the standard software for CD burning on Windows all comes from third parties. And for Linux, everything but the kernel is third-party.

    And because I can't help but throw in my two cents about ejecting disks in OS X...It's not very intuitive at first. You need to either find something in a manual that mentions the trash can's change to an eject icon, or you need to have gotten used to dragging the disk to the trash under OS 9 and try it nuder OS X. It isn't intuitive if the only way you're going to find out about the feature without consulting a learned source is if you're in the habit of dragging things around on the screen willy-nilly and eyeballing the dock for changes.

  • What, now you're going after the Poles? Jeez, maybe there is something to this "racist" accusation...

  • America - Come and save our ass! - Sir Winston Churchill
  • err, the apple i was just a prototype. it only existed as a motherboard, in the garage. it was never sold, produced, or delivered. the apple ][ was apple's first product.

    from a sales perspective, from a reach perspective, from the perspective of influencing the largest number of future computers, the apple ][ was definitely the beginning of something huge. whether it was the first PC, i dunno. but it was certainly much more important and influential than the TRS-80.

  • Re:not to start a flame war... (Score:3)

    by Fafhrd ( 37655 ) on Monday June 25, 2001 @03:21AM (#130246)
    Well, the first time I ever sat at a Mac, I placed a floppy in the drive, used it, and then spent a few minutes trying to understand where should I eject it (Which eject button, kemosabe? Mac floppy drives DON'T have an eject button, which is kind of the whole point)

    If a soul more acquainted with the MacOS hadn't passed by and said "Just drag it to the trash, it's ok, it won't be erased" I'd never tried it! The "logical" action associated with dragging the disk to the trash, to someone not used to the interface, would be to erase it.
  • Well, since on the Mac, everything that I drag to the trash gets erased including my grandma's recipes, why should it be any different with a disk? I used macs at school for years without ever realizing that I could just drag the disk to the trash.
  • No, everything you drag to the trash sits in the trash, just like the real world.

    Ok, since you like using the real world as model for a computer system, let's go with that analogy. I have "files" on my disk. Therefore, a disk is a way of collecting files into a single thing, the disk. Except I can't look at those files without a special machine, the computer. What is this like in the real world? Perhaps a microfilm reader would be a good example. So I take my microfilm and put it in the machine. When I am done, I need to take the microfilm back to the shelf. So I put it in the trash? At which point, the trash can automatically unloads the microfilm from the machine. Doesn't this seem a little backward to you?

    Another point, you say ...sits in the trash.... However, when I put my disk in the trash and go look in the trash, it isn't there! "Oh no! It erased my disk and ejected it!" By your logic, I should be able to go to the trash and "uneject" my disk by copying it back to the desktop.
  • No, I drag your grandma's recipes to the trash.
  • No, it wasn't. It was a school where we spent our time learning things. Not wasting our time dumping everything we could find on the computer into the trash.
  • I should've said "in addition to the physical hardware based button".

    Truth be told, I would probably never use these software solutions - rarely do I used a software disk eject feature, instead leaning over to hit the "eject" button (floppy, CD-ROM, Zip drive - of course, these last two are software controlled in some way, as you alude to).

    However, I can see some people wanting a software disk ejection mechanism, and for those, what I outlined is more intuitive in that regard.

    Worldcom [worldcom.com] - Generation Duh!

  • Instead of "hand"... (Score:3)

    by cr0sh ( 43134 ) on Monday June 25, 2001 @09:02AM (#130252) Homepage
    This sounds OK, but still isn't as intuitive. If you have an icon that represents a floppy (or some other removable media) drive, I can think of a few ways to intuitively eject the disk:

    1. A "button" on the icon that looks like an eject button - click on it to eject the disk.
    2. Drag the icon off the screen (preferably the bottom) to eject.
    3. Maybe an "Open Door" type icon, showing "exitability"?

    These are just my three suggestions - I am sure there are other ideas...

    Worldcom [worldcom.com] - Generation Duh!

  • Cool hacks from the show (Score:4)

    by sometwo ( 53041 ) on Monday June 25, 2001 @09:02AM (#130253)
    There is a more complete review of the show at macworld.com [macworld.com]

    Here are my favorite hacks:

    Some guy hacked an Apple one button mouse to make it two button. Here's a picture. [macworld.com] Here is the relevant passage from the article:

    He hands over a familiar-looking Apple ADB bar-of-soap style mouse. It's a little shiny, of course, but it looks perfectly ordinary, right down to its two buttons.

    Two buttons? Yes, two buttons. Josh happened along the specs for the off-the-shelf chip that drove the Apple ADB mouse, and noted an unused pin labeled SW1. SW0 is the signal line for the mouse button...did this mean that this thing had unexploited two-button support all along?

    In the end, all it took was putting in a second switch and running its two leads here and here. No re-engineering or re-design necessary. Only marginally more difficult than making toast. Of course he had to write a special mouse driver so the Mac could recognize the surplus button, but it works.

    Now that's a hack.

    Here's another intersting quote about John Warnock, CEO of Adobe:

    And most importantly in this venue, he proved himself a hacker. His presentation software? Adobe Acrobat. Naturally, he'd stick to an Adobe product over Microsoft PowerPoint. But Acrobat doesn't really have any built-in niceties as a presentation tool. No problem...John wrote Distiller code that automatically processes a folder of data into an organized presentation. He also uses Acrobat as his format of choice for storing his collection of digital photos...again, powered by Distiller code.

    The revelation of his use of Distiller came during the Q&A that followed, and invited a question: if you're unsatisfied with Microsoft PowerPoint, why not put out a new version of Persuasion, the presentation app Adobe stopped supporting a few years ago? Basically, because that requires an investment of not-considerable money and resources, and it's impossible to compete with a piece of software which Microsoft -- for all intents and purposes -- gives away.

    Then why not release Persuasion's code as open-source, so someone else can update it? Not a bad idea, John mused...

    There was a big opensource sermon [macweek.com] also.

  • I was actually at the Hack Show, watching Steve present his hack in the wee hours of the morning, and it was really obvious that he didn't actually patch the Finder's trash routines themselves. When he hooked up his laptop to the projector, the screen resolution on his laptop changed and that caused a small problem for his presentation. His hack depended on the location of certain icons on the desktop.

    Basically, he created another folder with the same icon as the trash can, and carefully positioned it over the real trash can. Then, he attached a folder action to his new folder which watched for items dropped into the folder. The folder action would simply move most items into the real trash, or present a dialog if the item was a disk volume. The dialog would then ask the user if the disk should be ejected or erased.

  • There's a reason Apple didn't have a manual eject button. Did you really want a blue screen saying please insert disk with serial # into the drive and press Enter when ready?

    No wonder Mac users never had Abort, retry, fail.

  • Extremely cool program, kudos man.
  • Valid point, but the moment you hold down the mouse button on a disk, the dock changes, no mousover needed.

  • The first person to actually recall the origin of my .sig? Stand up, and how about a round of applause for our fine young friend here?

  • echo "Apple" | sed 's|Apple|1 4M 4N 31337 M4C H4X0R|g'
  • Back when the early powerbooks came out many of them had a few bad pixels - Apple claimed at the time that this was expected and there was a certain number of bad pixels that were tollerable before Apple would replace yuor screen .... one of the MacHack entries back then was a program that would 'increase' the number of 'bad' pixels to above that number so that you could get your screen fixed
  • With MacOS X the control panel is not necessary for a second button and scroll wheels. For my third and fourth buttons yes, but for the first two, no.
  • My mom uses it just fine, and she is a non-computer-literate as they come. If you set up a login for her with just the programs she needs to use in the doc, and auto-start them, you can get a very minamalist computer experience. It does require that someone set it up for her this way, but that is no different than any other OS I have used.
  • Yeah... from the woz article....

    Woz finished the night with numerous stories of some of his best practical jokes.

    Funny one about the bills. Wish I could hear more. Bet there were some good ones.

  • If you have an icon that represents a floppy drive, I can think of a few ways to intuitively eject the disk: 1. A "button" on the icon that looks like an eject button - click on it to eject the disk.

    I dunno, how about "a button on the DRIVE" to eject the disc? Just because software CAN do it, doesn't mean software should become the ONLY way to do it.

    People have had 'eject' buttons since the first reel-to-reel tape devices, and a physical control to manipulate a physical process makes the most sense to a newcomer.

    Sure, it might be separated out with software catches; today's CDROM drives have a physical button that merely asks the software to shut it down, and Macs were the first personal computer that didn't merely sever the electrical supply in order to power down.

    I repeat, the physical control is often the most intuitive way to control the physical.

  • Why? Because PC floppy drives don't generate an OS event when a disk is inserted


    Umm, what? Define "OS event" please. To me, an OS event is one which is generated by software because of some status change occuring within the hardware. You would be wrong to assume that PC floppy disks cannot generate a hardware event for disk changes. Review INT 13h, function 16h - Determine Disk Change (Floppy Drive, AT, and PS/2 only). The OS can poll this function to then generate an "OS event".

  • Mac drives are better. They generate events. (Score:3)

    by Ukab the Great ( 87152 ) on Monday June 25, 2001 @04:43AM (#130267)
    One thing that people forget is that when you're using windows (which I try to do as least as possible, mind you), what happens often when you go to the top most directory in the file browser to save something? Immediately the floppy starts grinding away. Why? Because PC floppy drives don't generate an OS event when a disk is inserted. The computer has no way of keeping a record of when a floppy is sitting in the drive. The only solution to this is to poll the floppy, which generates the most grating noise. With the mac floppy drive(which probably should have an eject button that works the same way as the ones on zip drives), every time a floppy is inserted, it generates a disk event that tells the OS "Hey, there's a floppy inside you". When there's no floppy in the mac, the mac understands it's not there, so it's not going to do something futile and useless like searching for data on a floppy disk that doesn't exist. Given, the electronics required for this elegant solution raised the cost of mac floppy drives considerably. It's one of those technical superiority vs. price tradeoffs we see so much in the computer industry (SCSI vs. IDE, etc).

  • FWIW, in MacOS X the "trash" icon in the dock changes into an "eject" icon when you drag a disk, which is slightly more intuitive. of course you could always just eject the disk from the menubar or by right-clicking (or command-clicking) on the disk and choosing "eject."

    - j

  • How do I right click with my 1-button puck mouse?
    Why would you need to right click? Some software developer not understand the concept of UI?


    --

  • The Apple I was a bare PC board, and NOBODY could make it do a DAMN THING without a few hours with a soldering iron to set it all up.
    There is quite a distance between designing a floppy controller and waving a soldering iron around like you're building a Heathkit.


    --

  • Hardly, I think it was pretty clear that the MacHack ideal was something that he understood. The alienation of the audience is questionable as well. There were many in the audience who appreciated the lively and admittedly sometimes heated interchange. In fact, many were heard to be talking about ESR's keynote after the happy reminicense of this year's Mac engineering reunion.

    Few, I think, haven't taken advantage of open source efforts as they have worked to migrate onto the BSD framework of OSX. So while the idea of open sourcing software product may rub some the wrong way, there's no denying the advantages of using open source as a starting point for development efforts, even if just as a learning tool.

    In this regard, the Mac developer community has grown up over the last year, and IMHO ESR's keynote got the ball rolling.
  • Ultimately, the best part of the bizarre business deal that merged Apple and NeXT was the acquisition of Steve Jobs. For all his megalomania and at best offbeat management style, it's the singular vision of the The Steve that has brought Apple to where it is. Their hardware has, for sure, never been better. There is some definite question as to whether OSX can grow from a decent commercial UN*X to something more consumer oriented. My mom can't use it yet, that's for sure...

  • Some people just don't get it (Score:5)

    by shagoth ( 100818 ) on Monday June 25, 2001 @03:55AM (#130273) Homepage
    For those who have attended MacHack, ESR included, there is an understanding of the spirit of what's going on. The hack show is about rediscovering what it is that makes engineering and software design fun to begin with. Sure, some hacks are derivative and some are pure presentation with little or no coding involved. Heck, some the most legendary hacks have been pure showmanship. The reason that things like the Password sniffer went over well is because of the presentation. Blackmailing the entire audience serves as excellent marketing.

    Judging a hack on merits of utility or even total originality isn't fair. That's just not what this event is about. There's more here than merely recompiling dsniff to run on OSX. I would have thought that the whole thing would be fairly obvious to the slashdot crowd at large. Clearly, some get it and some don't.

    Now I need to figure out why I'm awake at 6a PDT on the Monday following 72 hours with very little sleep.
  • Nah, the Atari ST wins this easily. Seen one? Remember the extremely LARGE (even worse on PAL than NTSC) black borders around the usable screen area?

    Well. I might make some errors here, but it's something like:

    move.b $ff820a.w,#0
    nop
    move.b $ff820a.w,#1

    ... etc, in all the right places (two to remove the whole upper border, another two or one to remove the whole lower border .. this could be done with interrupts) ... or! Sync-lock (lock the CPU timing to the display raster pixel-perfect) and do this three times on EVERY scanlines to also remove the left and right borders. Doing this would open up the whole screen for graphics usage, although, when locked, all your code had to fit inside perfectly synced NOP loops ...

    Nuts? Well, at the end of the great demo era (-90 to 93) most demo-screens of any style would do this AND a lot of cool effects even though it was a BITCH to code it. We mostly used self-adjusting code etc that automatically filled itself inside these tightly controlled timing-loops.

    Mmm .. almost forgot, the actual move.b above will switch the refresh rate between 50 and 60Hz (upper and lower border) and 50/70 for the left&right ones.

    Ahh .. those were the days. And don't get me started on how this hack evolved into another hack where we could scroll the whole screen with only 7 scanlines of CPU usage .. (the Atari ST had _no_ hardware scrolling before this clever hack of refresh-rate shifting).

    Credits for border removal: Alyssa, TNT-Crew, TEX, The Carebears

    Credits for hardware-scrolling (also known as sync-scrolling): Sync [www.sync.st](yee, my old group), The Carebears and Omega.

  • You don't get it - do you? It was impossible to do on the Atari. Impossible. Until someone (Alyssa) started a few years of intense screen refresh-rate shifting totally screwing up the timings of the poor video-chip effectively giving access to the border areas.

    That's why it's such a great hack - because it really was impossible. Atari technicians themselves were totally stunned.

    ... then having that evolve into sync-scrolling (used in the game Enchanted Lands by The Carebears so it wasn't only for demo effects) on a computer that _could not_ scroll anything in hardware was kind of .. even .. more impossible.

  • So, we can watch our dock bounce up and down,
    equalizer style, to the music! Maybe just maybe
    that will make most of us forget that we still
    can't burn CD's with OS X/iTunes. :-(
  • Um, aren't there still several (ie, Que) drives that aren't supported for any type of burning yet?
  • Now why would dragging something to the trash imply that it would be erased? Where the hell did that metaphor come from? Certainly not from real life. When I put something in the trash, I want it out of my house (out, out, damn disk!), not molecularly scrambled so I can use its mass again.


  • And not one, but two keystroke commands that will eject a disk.

  • Better than trash - a "Hand" (Score:3)

    by Bitsy Boffin ( 110334 ) on Monday June 25, 2001 @03:32AM (#130280) Homepage
    I think that following the MAC desktop theme, dragging anything to the trash (including disks) should delete/erase. I don't like the trash to eject thing.

    They should also put a "Hand" on the desk, dragging anything to the hand would put something physical `in your hand'. If it's a disk, it would eject, if it's a document it would print, if it's a program it would say 'insert disk to put this file onto' and eject the disk when done.

    Oh and apple, if you take my idea on board, I'll have a piece of that pie thanks :-)

  • Re:dedicated hackers (Score:4)

    by Eagle7 ( 111475 ) on Monday June 25, 2001 @03:18AM (#130281) Homepage
    That makes him resourceful (read: Hacker), becuase he still manages to get a conference of use out of his laptop *before* he bitches and gets it fixed. Perhaps if we had more people like him and less like you in this world, there would be a lot more doing, and a lot less bitching. Either that, or we need to bring back reruns of McGyver and the ATeam to get the do-it-yourself, hack-it-together spirit back.
  • "Sadly, one hacker broke the screen of his G4 PowerBook at the beginning of the conference. Only the top third of his screen still worked. Did this stop him? Did he cry out against the uncaring fates?"

    No, but he did learn a new use for shirt tails when he got the bill to fix it from Micro Center [micro-center.com]...
  • everything that I drag to the trash gets erased

    No, everything you drag to the trash sits in the trash, just like the real world. You have to empty it later. Although the Mac doesn't have Garbage Chute, Compacter, Dumpster, Truck or Landfill icons to truly implement the real-world experience. Maybe "Empty Trash" should have been called "Incinerate"?

    Drag-to-trash to unmount a filesystem (and also eject removable media) is odd, but since the trash doesn't erase things, it isn't as bad as could have been. The problem is really with users who are already used to a "Delete file" operation from other systems; the Mac doesn't give you that directly. So you tell people who want to delete a file to drag it to the trash, and they associate "drag to trash" with "erase the file". But, of course, it's really just moved to a special directory on the disk; the file is still there, and you can drag it back if you want.

  • To my knowledge, Apple is the only computer manufacturer in history not to include an eject button.

    They compounded this on the PowerMac 6100 by putting the power button just underneath and to the right of the floppy drive! That was good for a few laughs...

  • Huh? (Score:1)

    by fatcow ( 121528 )
    There were dozens more hacks shown, including Apple scripts that do wild and unnatural things to your icons and Palm OS hacks that make your Palm mimic a Mac desktop

    Pooh. That's nothing. I can make my Palm mimic a Unix desktop, or even <shudder> a Windows desktop! Link: here [berkeley.edu]

  • Yeah, so they weren't the only ones. It seems a silly point of contention, though.

    --
  • Apple already confused people with the Trash/Eject function. It's not logical. To my knowledge, Apple is the only computer manufacturer in history not to include an eject button. Anyway, further down the article you'll notice the following:

    Wozniak's hack was to change the routines of the trash so that if you drag a disk to the trash, it gave you the option of either ejecting the disk or erasing it.

    The key word here is option. So, anyone used to ejecting their disks via the trash can will still be able to. However, people who want to erase the disk will also be able to. And no one is going to accidentally format the disk, especially if they don't have this hack installed anyway.

    --
  • "To my knowledge, Apple is the only computer manufacturer in history not to include an eject button"

    I don't recall ever seeing an eject button on Sun floppy drives.

  • . To my knowledge, Apple is the only computer manufacturer in history not to include an eject button.

    Sun, SGI, Next, Alpha and possiably other didn't include physical eject buttons (expect paper clip hole) on some or all of their machines.

    IMHO `eject` is the most easy to understand command to release the floppy...

    Actucally it is probably more rare to physically see an eject button, the only machine that I can recall having them are x86 PCs.


  • Well, even though I'm a Mac user (although I run too many other operating systems at home to be a full-fledged zealot), I thought the system stank. I know why it does what it does, and why that's a good thing, but it's the interface that was never too great. The no-eject-button and drag-to-trash thing should have been gotten rid of as soon as Macs had hard drives, since it is a atavism from the days of the OS being on the floppy disk. They should have put a button next to the drive that sends the disk eject event... the OS could handle all the file closing and dismounting and such. The same goes for CDs and Zips in modern Macs.
  • Control-click. Or do like the powerusers do and buy a 2-button mouse with the required control panel.

    /Brian
  • Have been using Macs since 1987 and dragging a disk to the trash has never felt right to me... there's no LOGIC! But then again there's no logic in many parts of the pre-OS X versions of the Mac OS. Chooser? When does one copy/move a file? memory management (or lack thereof) Hmm, I won't continue. And yes, my current desktop is OS X.
  • How do I right click with my 1-button puck mouse?

    =P

  • I do think dragging a disk to the trash is potentionally unintuitive, but after a while, it "feels right."

    Nevertheless, do note that under Mac OS X and the Aqua UI, dragging a disk toward the trash in the dock will make it change into a big 3D eject icon. It's REALLY cool looking. I think it makes more sense.

    Just so people realize, Apple did change that, and therefore apparantly would agree with what Woz is saying (who can often be seen wearing OS X t-shirts).
  • You know, they should make it so that you can just right-click on the disk and then.. oh wait.... nevermind.

    -Mark
  • The PC floppy drives CAN generate events.

    Every floppy drive that I've ever seen (and I've taken apart about twenty from different years and manufacturers) have microswitches in them that close when the disk is inserted. In fact, there are two, at the left and right sides of the disk, at the opening insertion slot of the drive.

    When the diskette goes in, the diskette drops down a little, closing the switches. DOS, Windows, Linux, and others FAIL to take advantange of the fact that the switches are there, but the drives are capable of generating the event.

    Why do I know this? recycling floppy drives from 386's- I found several drives with dirty microswitches, and a inserted floppy would give me "drive not ready" or "Please insert a disk and press any key when ready" errors in DOS, something I hadn't seen since the 5.25" days, when I'd leave a drive door open.



    A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
  • Grandpa, what is a floppy drive?
  • Ooohh, that's *good*!! Let's see that for GNOME!

  • Re:not to start a flame war... (Score:3)

    by Gordonjcp ( 186804 ) on Monday June 25, 2001 @03:36AM (#130299) Homepage
    Have none of you ever played with the menus?
    Along the top, with writing on?
    "Special", "Eject Disk" or "Put away disk"
    "Eject" just spits the disk out, "Put away" also removes it from the desktop (so the machine forgets the disk was ever inserted).
    Jeez, you guys call yourselves hackers...
  • Nah, the Atari ST wins this easily. Seen one? Remember the extremely LARGE (even worse on PAL than NTSC) black borders around the usable screen area?
    Removing the black borders? Gimme a break, that was trivial stuff on an Amiga. One bit in one of the custom chips' registers, IIRC. Or you could just redefine the resolution of your screen to get rid of them (I used to run my screen in 652x272 PAL). Amiga's copper lists allowed some stunning hacks. Probably the best one was in the OS itself: multiple real resolutions displayed simultaneously on one monitor. Or changing the palette of colors on every scanline. Or changing sprites on each line to simulate more hardware sprites.
  • alt-f4 works fine (and faster) for me
  • It's all Greek to me
  • but since macs eject the disk on powerdown it does eject the disks
  • Here was one that cought my attention:
    One of the most interesting hacks was Mac Murrett's Apple Turnover. This hack will invert the screen, and begin to rotate it as you work. System performance is not heavily taxed at all, as the hack takes advantage of AltiVec to manipulate the screen buffer.
    Gee. As I recall Amiga [amiga.com] have had some of the greatest screen hacks of all time, since the beginning of time. Remember that red and white checkerboard sphere... Let's see, they had screens that bounced, disolved, snowed, ran away from the mouse pointer, all sorts of great stuff. I miss the Amiga (I still have an Amiga 1000 in the basement 4MB memory, no internal HD, and a UI that rivaled the MAC any day). I think the Amiga is still the superior platform for screen hacks - unfortunately, there just isn't enough software out there for it anymore to make it a useful platform for much else.

    --CTH

    ---
  • Now I can't guarantee that Carlton's book is an objective and unbiased account of the times.

    If it's written with the same loving care and attention to details that his online columns are, I wouldn't trust it to correctly report the color of the sky over Apple's headquarters on any given day.

    That said, he probably has the rough facts right about Apple's abortive next-gen OS projects. Enough of that ongoing debacle played out in public that even a hack like Carlton couldn't help but stumble over a few of the facts.

    Occasionally I like to amuse myself by trying to list all of them from memory. Let's try, shall we?

    • A/UX (Unix SVR2 + MacOS compatibility layer...hey, doesn't that sound familiar?)
    • MacMach (CMU's Mach microkernel with OS7 hosted on it as a mach server...also hauntingly familiar, eh?)
    • StarTrek (OS7-on-Intel. A finished project: the OS booted and ran recompiled apps on a Pentium-66 faster than any machine Apple had ever shipped at the time. Killed and buried when Apple drank IBM's kool aid and commited to the PowerPC.)
    • Pink (far-out network-centric, object-oriented distributed OS that Apple had working in the labs as far back as 1992. Later turned into:
    • Taligent (Pink plus IBM's patented "OS/2 Kiss of Death" technology)
    • AIX (apple actually shipped boxes running AIX 4.1.3. as an amusing side-effect, you could actually boot OS8 on certain IBM RS/6000 servers)
    • NetWare for PowerMac. (Novell demonstrated this one at two consecutive MacWorlds, but never shipped it.)
    • MkLinux (Linux userland server hosted on our old buddy Mach...still kicking around on a few 1st-generation PowerMacs)
    • Copland -- you might have heard about this one. Started out as just OS7 plus protected memory...ended up with a proposed feature list a mile long and a ship date always a mile away.
    • Gershwin -- allegedly the full-on rock-em-sock-em retooled-from-the-ground-up followup to Copland
    • Rhapsody (AKA "NeXTStep 5.0 on PowerPC with OS8 window manager widgets...we're sure nobody will notice the difference!")

    ...and those are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head, and I'm not even counting the Newton OS or any of their other weird side-projects. (For instance, I'd give my eyeteeth to know what kind of OS the prototyped Apple set-top boxes that popped up on ebay last year were meant to run...)

    Given that history, I am still stunned that OS X actually shipped.

  • This is already there in Mac OS X. If you drag a removable, be it a CD-ROM or mounted disk image, to the trash, the icon changes into an Eject button. If you don't have a Mac OS X box yet to try this out, check out the end of this promo clip [apple.com].

  • They compounded this on the PowerMac 6100 by putting the power button just underneath and to the right of the floppy drive! That was good for a few laughs...

    I agree, that has got to be among the stupider things Apple has done:

    Me: Hey dude! Come see my new Mac! I'm just copying a big file off of my 2x CD-ROM right now.
    Friend: Okay dude! I've never seen a Mac before!
    Me: I've only got a old PowerMac 6100, dude!
    Friend: Dude! I here Macs don't have floppy drives.
    Me: Dude, that's only iMacs and stuff. I'm broke so I've only got an old Mac that I bought off some other dude. Mine has a floppy.
    Friend: Dude!

    [Puts floppy in drive.]

    Me: And it's cool how it ej--- Dude, NOOOOOOO!!!

    [Friend shuts down Power Mac 6100 while trying to eject floppy. Big file still copying.]

    Me: Are you an idiot dude? That's the power button! I was copying a big file! You eject it by dragging it to the trash, dude!

    [I start Mac back up only to be greeted by floppy with a flashing Question Mark]

    Me: Oh crap, dude! You screwed up my disk! And I don't have Mac OS 8.1 on me!

    Something like this did happen. Three days later I managed to aquire a burnt copy of OS 8.1 and found out only my Sytem File had crapped out.


    --Volrath50

  • Your flame is so childish I'm not going to even reply to it....oh, wait a second...damn. I guess I did.

    Now that you got me talking, I may as well go ahead and burst your bubble. Mac's are not the best systems in the world. Windows PC's are not the best in the world. And...here it comes...*nix systems are not the best in the world. In summary, there is no "One True System" that trumps all the others.

    People like to say that they have the best of something. The best car...the best console system...the best box...the best whatever. The truth is that your definition of "the best" is not my defninition nor is it most likley anyone elses definition. This argument is so old it is not even interesting anymore. Take the old console argument, for example. People fight over which console is the best and some even refuse to buy competing consoles. Everybody's either heard it or participated in it, I'm sure.

    People spend so much time defending "their system" that they never experience the other systems or they just neglect to see the perks of the other systems. Sure, everything has imperfections. But, everything has its own beauty. By being system biased, you miss out on the other systems' beauties.

    Our human nature says "be the best". Darwin said "survival of the fittest", therefore implying that the "best" will prevail. Sometimes you have to put aside all that competition crappola and see the innate beauty in things. I like Windows because I like games. I like Mac's because of their attitude and photo/video editing support. I like GNU/Linux because of the GPL and the fact that for a couple bucks I can get a CD off of the 'net that has so many GPL'ed programs I have a complete GNU system for $5 shipping. If I had a lot of cash, I would have all of them.

    Mac's are beautiful, Wintel's are beautiful, *nix boxen are beautiful. If they could only live together in peace and harmony. Why can't we all just get along? Now I sound like a hippy...eh, a techno-hippy I am.

    Thank you Lord Hugh Toppingham for giving me something to do while I am stuck at work. I consider the use of the internet and the reading/posting at Slashdot "research" for the IT dept. It's been fun.

  • Succes! (Score:4)

    by roguerez ( 319598 ) on Monday June 25, 2001 @02:55AM (#130322) Homepage
    Looks like the contest succeeded. They managed to Dos-attack Slashdot almost contineously for the last 48 hours. :)
  • by that rationale, windows is the greatest operating system ever, because you can do most everything on it. linux sucks, because it's hard to get a cd-r working. mac sucks, because it's easy to get it working, but it's just now coming out.

    the fact of the matter is, apple is turning out extremely high quality stuff. mac os x is a 1.0. actually, right now, it's a 1.0.4. it's not as if they've been building this for 15 years like windows. it's brand new. pardon if it takes 3 months for them to get cd burning fully implemented. compare to the 10 years after i began really using computers that i was able to burn cds in windows (1997). i still haven't been able to get an ide cd writer working in linux.

    apple is at a better position now than they've ever been. not only does their hardware not suck, but their software is getting better and better too. they'll never be the dominant operating system, but they'll certainly provide a more humanesque operating environment than any other pc manufacturer/operating system will.

  • Re:Neat -- an equalizer (Score:3)

    by dhamsaic ( 410174 ) on Monday June 25, 2001 @03:42AM (#130324)
    you can burn cds with itunes under os x. that's what release 10.0.2 was for. 10.0.4 is out now. you should upgrade maybe?

    you can't burn data cds yet, and you can't watch dvds, but that will be in the next release (as an employee of apple told me), which will be the last release before macworld new york. keep your software up to date and you'll be alright.

  • This [chaos.org] is undoubtedly the leanest, meanest hack I've ever seen. It's a fun project, and if you have kids they'll love it.

    --
  • Humm... I'd like to download that dock hack...looks like fun:) And reguarding that guy above... I think most firewire dirves do burn CD's under OS X. I actually have a yamaha drive that burns under X and not 9. All in all... toast for X is what is needed. It is a much better app. Burning in iTunes is slow. It takes to long to convert MP3s.

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