Jason Hong's Confabulations

Apple added a feature called Sudden Motion Sensor (SMS) to the PowerBook line in early 2005. The sensor attempts to prevent data loss by parking the heads of an active disk drive after detecting a "sudden motion", which could be due to strong vibrations or a fall.

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AMS Visualizer is a logical graphical extension of the amstracker command-line tool. It displays a 3D image of a PowerBook 15 that appears to "hang" in space.

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This example creates a window displaying a bicycle wheel. The window is "stable" in the sense that if you rotate the PowerBook left or right, the window compensates by rotating itself by an equal amount in the opposite direction in an attempt to remain in its original orientation with respect to the ground. The bicycle wheel rotates too — independently of the window.

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The "perturbed desktop" is hard to describe, and perhaps impossible to justify, even for a book example. It could be thought of as roughly the Stable Window concept applied to the entire graphical user interface, and then made unstable via some constraints. Now, nobody needs (hopefully) such "stable" windows in real life. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note the type of visual operations that are possible in Mac OS X.