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

See it live in your browser →

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. It’s WebGL2 for now, but WebGPU is shaping up nicely, so native ports aren’t off the books.

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.