Take a trip in the Mac OS time machine

Filed under: OS Updates, News, Macintosh

Take a trip in the Mac OS time machine

by Marc Perton Aug 28th 2005

Think the Mac GUI was always as slick as it is now, with its brushed metal, translucent windows, animated dock other bits of eye candy? Think again. John Wells has compiled a set of screenshots of most major Mac OS releases going all the way back to System 1.0, and what's most striking, at least for me, is how little the GUI changed during its first ten years. Sure, there were some attempts at adding color and texture, but the fact is that System 7.5, released in 1994, doesn't really look a whole lot different from System 1.0, released ten years earlier. Meanwhile, during those same ten years, Windows progressed from the execrable interface of Windows 1.0 to Windows 95, which — while certainly not gorgeous — really did give 7.5 a run for its money. It's little wonder that Steve Jobs scrapped almost the entire GUI when he returned to Apple in the late 90s, replacing it with OSX's Aqua interface (which is what 7.5 could have been if Jobs had been at Apple earlier in the decade, instead of in exile at NeXT).

[Via TUAW]

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Civiballs is a beautiful, soothing physics puzzle Time Waster

I have an absolute weakness for physics games, and while Civiballs isn't the strongest physics-based game, what it lacks in the physics department it makes up for a few times over in style and fun.

In Civiballs, you are presented with a few colored balls, and your goal is to get those balls into the same-colored urn on the level. The "civi" part of Civiballs is that there are 3 sets of levels to play, each representing a different civilization. While the civilization doesn't affect gameplay, the artwork for each level is beautifully themed to it's appropriate era.

To play the game, you are given only one tool - a sword with which to cut the chains that are holding the balls. The puzzle part of the game is in figuring out what order, and with what timing to cut each chain. Do it right, and all the right balls end up in the right urns, with no stray balls entering an urn (a no-no). Do it wrong, and you get to start over again.

Civiballs is not terribly deep on gameplay; the entire game can be completed in about 15 minutes. But if you enjoy this type of game, it will be a very enjoyable 15 minutes.

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