Mihai Parparita:

Infinite Mac can now run early Mac OS X, with 10.1 and 10.3 being the best supported versions. It’s not particularly snappy, but as someone who lived through that period, I can tell you that it wasn’t much better on real hardware. Infinite HD has also been rebuilt to have some notable indie software from that era.

As Mihai notes they take a while to boot, but are fairly usable one up and running. It was a great blast from the past to poke around these this evening. There’s some familiar apps on the Infinite HD—a good reminder of how many great indie apps were available from really early on.

Mac OS X was what got me back into the Mac after a few years on Windows 98. I started with Public Beta and continued with each new release until 2017.

I was surprised to be reminded of how quickly the UI evolved. I knew that it was iterated upon with every major new version, but even by 10.3 here it’s looking quite clean. Not sure the brushed metal holds up but the refined version of Aqua is pretty great.

Eric Migicovsky:

We’re excited to announce two new smartwatches that run open source PebbleOS and are compatible with thousands of your beloved Pebble apps.

• Core 2 Duo has an ultra crisp black and white [e-Paper] display, polycarbonate frame, costs $149 and starts shipping in July.
• Core Time 2 has a larger 64-colour [e-Paper] display, metal frame, costs $225 and starts shipping in December.

I passed by the original Pebble watches, dismissing them as weak compared to the Apple Watch. However, in the years since I’ve come to have much more appreciation for hardware that affords its owner large amounts of customisability, especially when paired with open-source firmware. The new rePebble watches are both of these things, so I have pre-ordered a Core 2 Duo in white.

Eric also has a related post setting expectations for iOS users:

I want to set expectations accordingly. We will build a good app for iOS, but be prepared - there is no way for us to support all the functionality that Apple Watch has access to. It’s impossible for a 3rd party smartwatch to send text messages, or perform actions on notifications (like dismissing, muting, replying) and many, many other things.

It’s things like this that help make my switch to Android last year feel worth it.

Neut is a functional programming language with static memory management.

Its key features include:

• Full λ-calculus support
• Predictable automatic memory management
• The absence of annotations to the type system when achieving both of the above

Neut doesn’t use GCs or regions. Instead, it takes a type-directed approach to handle resources.

This looks quite full-featured and complete with documentation, formatter, LSP server, and a handful of sample applications written in it. It’s good to see another language offering some of the benefits of Rust, but potentially easier to learn and write.

I haven’t been able to try it myself yet as I’m travelling with my Windows ARM laptop and there’s no Windows support at the moment. Also the pre-compiled binaries appear to need glibc, so it doesn’t run in my Chimera Linux WSL instance. It’s implemented in Haskell, but ghc hasn’t been packaged for Chimera, so can’t build from source either.

Peter Marheine:

I often find that imposed limitations make it easier to create things: it’s easy to aim for perfection if you can expend as much effort as you like on something and thus end up with nothing that you’ll ever call good enough to share. Over on Cemetech in the final months of 2023, we held a programming contest: write a screensaver, any kind of screensaver. I’m not often one to do any kind of competitive programming, but as a prompt for a constrained project this was a good one for me. As a result, I wrote a program I called WEB1999, that won second place.

Inspired heavily by the Realistic Internet Simulator (“Kill the Pop-ups”), WEB1999 invokes the spirit of pop-up advertising and Internet culture around the turn of the millennium in the form of a program that runs on Texas Instruments’ TI-84+ CE color-screen graphing calculators.

Some of the earliest programs I wrote were on my TI-83 in high school, so I have a soft spot for TI graphing calculators. In fact, my TI-89 from university still lives on my desk and sees regular use.

This WEB1999 project combines nostalgia for TI graphing calculators, and the early web, what’s not to love.

Ian Betteridge:

Most Mac users of a certain age remember Power Computing, the Mac cloner who undercut Apple with better machines back in the mid-90s. Apple ended up buying Power Computing out and putting an end to the clone market. Well if you can’t compete, use your financial muscle.

It’s often said that Apple bought the company – but it didn’t. Even Wikipedia gets this wrong, claiming that Power was an Apple subsidiary. In fact, what Apple bought was the Mac-related assets of Power, including the license to make Mac clones. Apple did not acquire the company.

It sure is a sad tale. The Wikipedia page is an interesting read too.

By the end of January 1998, Power was gone. Ironically, if the company had survived for longer, the $100m in Apple stock would have been worth a lot, lot more than Power itself ever was or could have been.

According to Stockulator That $100M of 1997 Apple stock would now be worth $122.33B, and would have paid $4.5B in dividends!