An ode to the macOS Drift screensaver that runs in the browser.

Launch in browser  ·  Watch recording  ·  Follow me on Twitter  ·  Support my work

Backstory

I’ve been enamoured of the Drift screensaver ever since it came out with macOS Catalina. It’s mesmerizing. I feel like it’s become an instant classic, and, dare I say, it might stand to dethrone the venerable Flurry screensaver. Hats off to the folk at Apple responsible for this gem 🙌.

This is an attempt at capturing that magic and bottling it up in a more portable vessel. This isn’t a port though; the source code for the original is locked up in a spaceship somewhere in Cupertino. Instead, consider this a delicate blend of detective work and artistic liberty.

Reviews

“You’re the first person I’ve seen take this much of an interest in how we made Drift and it looks like you nailed it… minus maybe one or two little elements that give it some extra magic 😉 Great work!” — anonymous Apple employee

Screensavers

I’m working on wrapping Flux into native screensavers for MacOS, Windows, and Linux. The source code for that is at sandydoo/flux-screensavers. Follow me on Twitter for updates.

Build

Using Nix

Build a new release in the result folder:

nix build

Or open a development shell with all the neccessary tools:

nix develop

cd web
yarn serve

Manual build

There’s a few things you’re going to have to install.

• rustc with wasm32-unknown-unknown as a target
• cargo
• wasm-pack
• node
• pnpm or yarn
• elm

How you get these dependencies depends on the operating system you’re running. Here’s an example for macOS and Linux using rustup:

rustup toolchain install stable
rustup target wasm32-unknown-unknown

cd web
pnpm install

Run a development server from the web folder:

pnpm serve

Build a release:

pnpm build

License

MIT © Sander Melnikov.