The Macintosh Garden is a great resource in the retro Mac community. It has an archive of nearly every piece of software released in the 80s and 90s, complete with screenshots, manuals, and metadata like year of release and operating system requirements. From its debut Infinite Mac would let you use files from the Garden: download it to your computer, and then drag it in to have it appear in the “Downloads” folder.  But while doable, it’s not the same as being discoverable or pleasant to use if you wanted to do this more than a few times. 

Inspired by the CD-ROM library feature, I decided to investigate what it would take to add a “Macintosh Garden” drawer to the site. The goal was to allow any item in the Garden’s catalog to be loaded into the emulated Mac with one click (at least for the versions that support “The Outside World”, which is most from System 7 to Mac OS 9). I reached out to the Garden’s maintainer, who was on board with the project and even provided a JSON dump of the site’s catalog of 20,000 applications and games. Building the UI was a fun exercise in making the CD-ROM drawer into a reusable component - another contribution to my collection of Classic- and Platinum-themed UI controls.

In keeping with the secondary goal of Infinite Mac bringing the best of web technologies to retro-computing, I wanted the Macintosh Garden drawer to be as fast as possible. The entire catalog was 86 megabytes of JSON, which would take a while to load, even with gzip compression (27 MB). I decided to create a custom data format, with only a small index file being necessary to render the drawer list view and support search-as-you-type. It contains plain JavaScript arrays with known indices for the title, author, and other data. This approach (inspired by the JsPbLite format) minimizes redundancy while keeping decoding simple. The file is 1.5 MB, and only 439 KB when compressed with gzip, which - combined with preloading - makes the drawer pretty snappy.

A separate “details” file with descriptions, download URLs, and other information is loaded by the Cloudflare worker, which serves pieces of it on-demand. The worker also handles proxying of downloads from the Garden, both to avoid running into CORS issues and because Cloudflare’s caching should help with frequently-used items. For downloads that are large CD-ROM images, the HTTP range-based streaming approach from the CD-ROM library is also used to help with performance.

The search UI supports operators, which were implemented by a simple predicate function run as part of a linear search (the data set is small enough that fancier indexing is not required). As a small UI touch, I finally got to use scroll snap for something (the carousel view for screenshots). I also added support for triggering downloads of an item via a URL parameter, so it’s possible to share links to a favorite item.

In terms of other Infinite Mac-related work, it’s been relatively quiet. I have been tracking DingusPPC development, and it’s now possible to (sometimes, very slowly) boot Mac OS X 10.2. I also made some small quality-of-life improvements: more control over scaling, it’s harder to accidentally close the site via Command-W, and era-appropriate fonts are now used.