Sneak preview: TouchScroll cdev

[Crutch]

Not sure if anyone else is addicted to running Mini vMac for iPad and carrying it around with you everywhere you go, but … I am.

And it’s bugged me that when running it, the obvious thing to do - scrolling documents open in Mini vMac by swiping on the iPad - doesn’t work. (I mainly use it for hacking up THINK C code on the go.)

Now it does! Here’s a preview of “TouchScroll,” an INIT (soon to be cdev) I built to implement swipe-scrolling and inertial scrolling directly inside System 7 (and probably later flavors of System 6 also, as well as MacOS 8 and 9 - though none of those are tested yet). It was fairly tricky to build in part because it’s surprisingly difficult to get the correct local coordinates of scrolls bars at random times. I had to patch SystemEvent, FindControl, TrackControl and (to trick apps to let me scroll less than 1 line at a time for a smoother effect) ScrollRect, among other things.

Nothing here actually assumes you’re using an iPad. You can get inertial scrolling on a desktop install of Mini vMac (or in fact, any other emulator) just buy dragging (quite) fast vertically in any window with a scroll bar, even the Finder. (Of course I had to co-opt the classic Susan Kare “grabber” cursor for the drag action.)

If there’s interest I will polish this up and release it here sometime soon. For now here’s a quick screencap video. Either way I find it personally very useful!

 

[cheesestraws]

That's brilliant.

 

[Phipli]

Thats excellet work. What happens if you install it on real hardware? Do you get inertial scrolling by flicking the mouse?

 

[Crutch]

Thats excellet work. What happens if you install it on real hardware? Do you get inertial scrolling by flicking the mouse?

You certainly should! I admit I haven’t tested that yet. It would be fairly slow probably. The video capture was on a Mac II emulator running at 16x (my default). It might be OK on an 040 or PPC.

 

[timtiger]

running Mini vMac for iPad

Wow, I didn’t even know that mini vmac for iPad exists…

I love the classic os for its extendability. Great work!

 

[Crutch]

Mini vMac for iPad is highly awesome - I wonder if this person Jesus Alvarez is on these forums? https://namedfork.net/minivmac/

He’s got some nifty stuff on his website.

It does seem to require doing a custom build on xCode, which takes like 10 minutes though the initial setup is slightly daunting. Not sure why he can’t just distribute the prebuilt app, probably some App Store rules involved. I know nothing about modern iOS/iPadOS software distribution….

 

[robin-fo]

Wow!

 

[Juror22]

I didn’t even know that mini vmac for iPad exists

At one point, mini vmac existed for pretty much everything... I had it running (albeit a bit slowly) on a jail-broken nook, so that I could use it in bright sunlight, out-of-doors (no screen washout like with LCD's). Unfortunately, the same technology that allows it to be viewed well in that environment did not function well with the screen refreshes from Mac UI items like mouse cursors, menus, window banding ...well, pretty much all of it.

This is a very nice fix - I haven't tried it on the iPad in some time, but this would definitely be a reason to check it out again (once you release this out)!

 

[Iesca]

Awesome work!

 

[pax]

Love it! I will try this out for sure if you end up releasing. I imagine getting real good milage out of it in Basilisk.

 

[PB170]

Wow, that's really cool!

I don't own a tablet, and pretty much only use emulation on the occasional moments when I need to try something out in color that doesn't work in OS 9 on my Quicksilver G4 (the only other Mac with support for classic Mac OS that I own, apart from my old Classic II, and still my main machine for many things ).

But amazing work! Have to try it out on my PowerBook when you release it and see what it does Maybe I'll have to go and get an external trackpad for it