Recreating the Flying Toasters screen saver for the Vision Pro

[btown]

The original Flying Toasters may be the classic, but the singing Flying Toasters from After Dark 3.2 will always have a special place in my heart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjlusi_h_XA

Flying out of the sun / The smell of toast is in the air / When there's a job to be done / The flying toasters will be there.

And it's flap! Flap! Flap! / Now help is on the way. / This vict'ry song they sing:

We pop up to save the day / On mighty toaster wings!

[tecleandor]

Something kicked in my memory when I started that video and for a second I couldn't temember properly if I was hearing the Flying Toasters song or Ever Onward IBM [0]. I remember having a DOS program with a PC Speaker karaoke version of that song, maybe on a disk that also included Alley Cat by IBM too.

  0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9oh3gqOEKU

[NickM]

Couldn't help noticing the app size is ~150MB - not sure if this is something you can avoid, or if maybe all AVP apps automatically include a lot of extra cruft, but it feels like surely an app this simple shouldn't have to be that big?

[netruk44]

> maybe all AVP apps automatically include a lot of extra cruft

I'm making a simple physics playground app for the vision pro and it clocks in at 7.8 MB total in the app store.

Granted, my app doesn't have any assets in it unlike this one. So maybe vision pro assets are heavy for some reason.

[floxy]

Just as interesting, what were the requirements for the original screensaver? Certainly it ran on Windows 3.0. How many floppy disks did it come on? How much RAM did it use? It almost certainly has to be less than 1MB, probably much less. Looks like it ran on 10 MHz 80286's:

https://lowendmac.com/2007/how-after-dark-came-to-windows/

[peddling-brink]

Could be really bloated assets. Or really bloated tracking sdks. I see this a lot with spammy iOS apps, size is either a handful of megabytes or hundreds.

[mcfedr]

> Initially, my plan was to employ gaze tracking to identify moments when a user might be “zoned out”. Due to privacy considerations, Apple restricts access to such sensor data.

First thing I see here, again, Apple with, here is a great bit of hardware, but you can only use it in the 3 ways we thought of, nothing else is valid.

[silentsanctuary]

I get your point, but this feels like an odd place to make it. The idea that all application developers could examine, record, analyse, and eventually abuse something as personal as your gaze tracking data is truly terrifying, and the fact that Apple doesn't allow it is something that makes me feel more comfortable buying a headset of theirs that has the feature in the first place.

[geocrasher]

Flying Toasters are great and everything, but can somebody recreate the Opus 'n Bill screensaver?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IP26kghndkE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DywBp3U2hQ

[MR4D]

FTA...

"Check out the app previews and screenshots on the app store to get a visual: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flying-toasters/id6479964879 "

I highly recommend watching the video on that link to the app store. The dev did a nice job.

[jmbwell]

And the sleeping cat has no idea what's going on right behind it!

[FabHK]

Very nice, though the categorisation as a “Productivity” app is maybe questionable… :-)

[spacemadness]

Tangential to this, but I don’t really see any discussion about Vision Pro since launch. Is it dead on arrival?

[eddieroger]

It's got its use cases that don't align with the kind of topics here, so it's not discussed. Doesn't make it dead, just unpopular with the HN crowd. Maybe even fair to say unpopular with the mainstream crowd. But so was the first, Mac-only iPod, and here we are. I have one. I use it every day for a handful of things, but I don't come on here and talk about it.

[laidoffamazon]

I've been using it daily, it's excellent. I'm on a trip and don't have access to it and I'm seriously missing it.

[thomastjeffery]

It's grounded on launch with it's own concrete shoes.

Apple released a VR headset that you can't use to play video games or watch porn with, and priced it at ~2-6x the price of competitive hardware.

[langsoul-com]

Everything that can be said about it already has been.

Right now, just gota wait for 3rd gen for the real stuff to happen.

Similar story with Quest, 1 was ok but 3rd gen is actually great.

[laweijfmvo]

it might seem silly, but this “flying toaster” sort of thing was exactly the type of first apps being developed for the iphone. we know what eventually happened. so time will tell.

[huytersd]

I don’t see any discussion of Apple products at all on here outside of the reveal.

[grecy]

A lot of the articles so far are speculating it's mostly a technology demonstrator, or close to a dev kit.

Everyone seems to agree it's mighty impressive, but not quite there yet.

Gen 2 or Gen 3 will surely be cheaper, lighter and better, and somewhere along there I'm betting we'll see iPhone levels of adoption.

[frozenport]

Yeah.

Basically you can use it as an TV and that’s about it. The gesture interface is incompatible with any efficient data manipulation and the screen underperforms compared to a computer monitor.

Unlike the iPhone Apple can’t simply software patch or enable an App Store to fix these issues.

[alanbernstein]

I want to recreate the windows Maze screensaver in VR... but with the animated fractal textures on walls, floor and ceiling.

[RobertRies]

That sounds oddly terrifying. Like gray goo devouring the world.

[starshadowx2]

I'm not sure if you can change the textures but there is Screensavers VR - https://store.steampowered.com/app/881670/Screensavers_VR/

[serf]

that's only a few elements away from a 'Serial Experiments: Lain' episode.

[exe34]

My favourite screensaver was a mac app I installed around 2009, it would randomly show a BSOD. Was quite the novelty at the time, given the laptop only really crashed twice in the 4 years I had it and then had to give it back to the department.

[pryelluw]

OT: check out my annoying screensaver based on the bouncing DVD logo. https://github.com/pryelluw/mac-dvd-screensaver

[rideontime]

Sounds like the BSOD screensaver included in XScreenSaver, which you can still install today: https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/screenshots/

It actually fooled me once when it happened to choose a MacOS crash screen while I was in the bathroom.

[j_m_b]

This bring back memories of AfterDark. They had other screen savers in the software package, but this was definitely the most whimsical.

[bredren]

The Star Trek AfterDark screensaver was the jam! Tribbles https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdQ_ekXdoqU

[ethbr1]

This makes me feel old.

Number of things that need explaining now:

   - Computers used analog CRT monitors
   - CRTs had burn-in if left static
   - Screen savers showed dynamic images
   - After Dark / flying toasters was a classic screensaver
   - Software was sold on floppy disks
   - Purchased at physical computer stores
   - After Dark-era floppy disks were hard, not floppy
   - "Screen Savers" is also not to be confused with the TechTV show
   - TechTV merged with G4 in 2004, then closed in 2014, then restarted in 2020, then reclosed in 2022

I think that brings us back to modern times.

Also, has anyone recreated Snake for the AVP yet? And I don't mean fancy-Snake: I mean Nokia Snake.

[thebruce87m]

- People didn’t care about power usage as much

Also, with OLED monitor screens becoming more popular maybe they will make a comeback? My OLED TV has a screensaver.

[halfnormalform]

The small floppy disks were still floppy disks. Thick plastic does not make a hard disc!

[msmith]

- “G4” the TV network, not to be confused with the series of Mac computers

[yardstick]

While we’re going down memory lane, I wish someone would recreate, reimagine, or make a sequel to Johnny Castaway.

[sumtechguy]

mumble mumble mumble hEEEEEEEE

[Gormo]

I'd love to see a full port of XScreenSaver to VR platforms. It has its own variation on flying toasters (https://youtu.be/mLGDvtbFvfg) along with many, many other modules.

[SapporoChris]

Can you explain the desire? Is it just nostalgia? I just don't understand the need for a screensaver for a VR device. Do people idle long enough with the VR device worn for a screensaver to come on?

[clintonb]

I was just thinking about MOPy fish (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOPy_fish)...and how much it encouraged wasting paper!

[ProllyInfamous]

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOPy_fish

<link fixed>

[rcarmo]

I love that it's in the "Productivity" category in the App Store.

[diroussel]

A missing feature of the App Store is that it does not support screen savers. You can only download an app that spits out a screen saver. I would love the ability to download free and paid screensavers from the App Store that are sandboxed and would update automatically.

How can it be that apple makes its own screen savers so prominent each year, yet doesn’t support screen savers in the App Store?

[readyplayernull]

This is exactly the kind of first apps developed for devices. Since history repeats, I'm waiting for my Vision miner headlamp.

[dhosek]

Definitely a 1.0 product in the graphics, but I love the whole concept of a murmuration of flying toasters in my living room. More whimsy like this, please.

[bayeng]

Yep, I wanted to get something out there and iterate based on feedback. Would love to hear suggestions!

[Dalewyn]

I definitely appreciated (and still do!) having my mind blown as a kid by the sheer sense of humor that developers have.

It feels like we lost many subtlely important things in the drive starting in the 2000s to "clean up" software and their development.

[notbeuller]

The youtube video linked has the toasters going north west to south east - they canonically travel from north east to south west. Did they flip the video to avoid a copyright claim?

[gimmethecookies]

I would get this just to keep jumping through the portals and chilling in the toasterverse. Looking forward to what else the dev has in store!

[thangalin]

Shout out to the author, Bill Stewart.

https://uxfactor.ca/1151/

[notbeuller]

Bill Stewart was by no means the author of after dark or the flying toasters[1] He did do the windows port of the screen saver engine and some modules, but that was years after they'd first shipped as part of the Mac version of After Dark.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Dark_(software)

[orblivion]

Apple already recreated Dinosaur Adventure 3D, sort of

[pugworthy]

Voodoo Lights was my go to back in the day

[rideontime]

All that effort, only to use a disgusting AI-generated app icon. That's a shame.

[Tadpole9181]

They're a developer making a cutesy little nostalgia toy, not an artist. I'm sure they'd be ecstatic for you to donate a couple hundred for them to hire a professional humam?

In the interim, this works fine and looks better than what most developers can make themselves.

[sp332]

Agreed. The toaster is made of a loaf of bread? And the slots are sideways.