Frame of preference A history of Mac settings, 1984–2004
aresluna.org207 points by K7PJP 22 days ago
207 points by K7PJP 22 days ago
It took me a while to figure out that the nice product shots of Mac computers were actually live, interactive copies of the relevant operating system, running under emulation. Even the laptops with the screen at a weird angle from the camera.
And the emulator tracks whether you've done the things mentioned in the article, like open a particular control panel or tried a particular menu option.
This is amazing.
There are even Easter Eggs and additional tasks. If you click on the system description button for each emulator it will give you a list.
I couldn't get the later emulators to work correctly though. My mouse kept flying off to the right of the screen for some reason. Also unfortunate is the scaling and tilting effect makes the screens look real bad on my machine. Just ugly aliasing artifacts everywhere.
The old 68k Macs are emulated with Basilisk II, which shims the mouse driver so it can just take mouse events from the host OS and move the cursor to the corresponding pixel on screen. The PowerPC Macs and NeXT boxes are emulated with a lower-level emulator that wants to get raw deltas from the mouse, not an absolute pixel position. If you just wave the mouse over the emulator, you'll get something approximating the expected movement (but much slower); once you click on the emulator it captures the mouse and you can use it as intended.
I agree it would be nice to have an "untransformed" view of the screen; I suspect the site might have been designed with the expectation of a high-DPI screen.
Unfortunately on the later Macs the mouse was way too slow to be useful (it kept falling well behind of where I was pointing and then my mouse would exit the area). Clicking on the emulator is when the mouse suddenly acted like I was always moving it right.
It took me a minute to realize they're not just videos too. Really outstanding work.
It's a very nicely crafted article. It was quite jarring to see a box containing the following text:
> If you open this on a computer instead, you will have a chance to play with some emulators!
Instead of what? I was under the impression that the device I was on is a computer.
Edit: I was curious to understand what caused the site to show that box. From looking at the source and some interacting in the console, it seems to have been due to the 'isiOS' variable having the value 'true'. It was true despite the device not running iOS because '(navigator.maxTouchPoints && navigator.maxTouchPoints > 2)' was truthy, and window.MSStream wasn't. This device, a Surface Pro X, or more precisely the Chrome 139 browser running on it, reports 10 max touch points and doesn't have MSStream defined, and that appears to have been enough for it to be mistaken as a not-a-computer.
By now, after refreshing, I see an extra sentence 'Hey, site, you got it wrong. This is a real computer!' Perhaps the author saw this comment and added it quite quicky? If so, thank you!
Absolutely incredible the amount of work and love that has gone into this. What an insane love letter to the power of the web - as well as to the Mac!
The writer, Marcin Wichary, was also behind https://guidebookgallery.org/ on the same general topic... Can it really be almost 20 years ago?
The conclusion is true.
> 2020s are the Lisa years. Outside of Accessibility, everything feels anodyne and disposable. There might not be a single control panel in modern macOS that feels like someone cares.
> Teddy Bears, managing memory, and Gizmo I don’t miss. But the care I do.
Using and seeing some of the earlier control panels, including in OS X, really drives this home.
What an incredible application of the infinite-mac project. I'm eager to learn how the in-emulator events were dispatched to the page script.
Edit: good lord, what's it doing with these hotspots? Is all the checkbox progression outside of the emulators, in "screen space"? By analyzing specific pixels in the current emu framebuffer?!
https://aresluna.org/site/scripts-frame-of-preference.js?v60
An embedded Mac where I can play cosmic osmo in the browser with something that looks like a real screen... I knew it was possible, but wow. Super cool.
It would incredible if this worked on my iPad Air too, but alas. What a beautiful website and article though, thoroughly enjoyed it.
The author has also written the keyboard book - Shift Happens[1]. Also an incredible love letter, this one for keyboards. I kickstarted it and cannot be happier!
The changes Apple made to Mac settings in Ventura are the worst, the layout used to be spread out and easy to find with large icons, now with the new settings layout I am always lost and spend way more time trying to find what I am looking for, not to mention the icons that make no sense
I have just completely quit trying to click on anything in the new system settings and just type shit in the search bar.
You can make the list less squinty by playing with the “sidebar icon size” setting but this will also affect the sidebars in Finder, and maybe some other stuff around the system and programs that actually use the native widgets instead of cramming a web browser into a window, who knows, I just keep it at a size I like for the Finder.
Icons + labels is usually better than just icons or just labels. This also applies here (1986 vs 1984).
Love the embedded screen recordings, the effects throughout the article were a good mix of nostalgia + illustration.
Edit:
...and I completely missed that they're running live emulation!
Very nice write-up, worth the read.
While on the Apple side preference and settings might not always have been consistent and smooth sailing, the utter shambles we have had to endure on the Microsoft side in this area post Windows 7 is beyond any comparison.
I still go to File looking for File > Preferences and File > Quit.
Great article, great website, well done. Don't remember the last time I looked at that PowerBook G4. It is indeed _gorgeous_.
What a great article. I didn't realize you can run early version of OS X in the browser.
I have a fast internet connection and a modern browser, but this website is simply a tragedy. nothing loads on time...
In the site's defense, it is emulating like ten different operating systems as you scroll.
They are paused as required. Here's the making of: https://blog.persistent.info/2025/07/infinite-mac-embedding....
The site loads just fine on my iPhone XS from 2018.
> As a designer, I’m meant to dislike settings
This is one of the worst designed websites I have ever opened