Apple has always pushed its hardware as creative types of tools - not toys for gamers - but that hasn't stopped creative developers from turning Macs into unique gaming machines, such as placing lemmings on touch bars, and now an icon -Playing a playable version of the shape Pong in the dock.
By the day, Neil Sardesai is an iOS engineer at a company called Butterfly (maker of a handheld ultrasound device that sends live imagery to a smartphone or tablet) but in his spare time he "makes applications, games, and other cool stuff" that Share them. Make it available on Twitter and sometimes through GitHub. Previous creations include Mouse Finder, a fun replacement for the MacOS Finder icon that animates smiling face eyes so that they always follow the mouse pointer. But one of Sardesai's recent creations seems like the perfect way to secretly pass the time during a boring zoom meeting.
This is a game of Pong, which if you search the Mac App Store, is already available in many other iterations for MacOS. But Sardesai's version is not played in a window that you need to hide or minimize when you need to work. Instead, it is completely self-contained inside its own dock icon and is played by simply moving the mouse pointer up and down to control the paddle. This is incredibly minimal, but also one of the first mainstream video games, Pong, so it is a perfect match.
Sardesai has yet to release Doc Pong via GitHub, but eventually wants to, and hopefully soon, as many of us are still stranded at home and looking for new ways to endure endless video calls. Desperately needed. His creation has inspired others, however, including Chris Jones who answered almost any technology-asked question: Will it drive doom?
The answer is yes, which is great news for those who find Pong a bit lethargic and who don't mind playing a classic first-person-shooter while squatting on a small icon at the bottom of their screen. Doom is not yet available for download, but hopefully, Jones and Sardesai inspire other developers to create even more dock games so we can all set up a miniature arcade below when 10am rolls around and we're Do not feel like this.
We've seen many unconventional uses for the MacBook Pro's fancy new touch bar, including using it as a piano or turning the kit from a Knight Rider into a full machine. But playing a simpler version of the classic puzzle game Lemmings may be the most wonderful use of hardware upgrades.
Eric Olson is responsible for this hack, which not only has green-haired lemmings moving back and forth in the touch-bar, they can also be tapped to limit where they can rotate back and forth. It was not as strong as the original game, but let us testify to the concept that Eric plans to accelerate even further.
Ever since Apple dropped its latest MacBook Pro with a quiet but mostly unnecessary touch bar, programmers have been jumping at the chance to create cool but mostly unnecessary apps to run on it. This new one does not break with that tradition but it turns your MacBook Pro from Knight Mac Rider into a kit.
Anthony da Mota recently uploaded Nighttouchbar 2000 to GitHub to try any and all for free. All of this gives the touch bar look and acts like a red light bar on the front of the KITT 2000 Pontiac Trans Am — only bouncing back and forth at the top of the keyboard. Oh, and it plays the theme song for the iconic television show. It is hard to say whether there is a bonus or not.
If you don't have a fancy, expensive Mac with a touch bar, there is a way to fake it, but if you want to see this particular application in action, check out the video below.
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