macOS Sequoia’s Macintosh screen saver is one of the strongest hits of nostalgia Apple has ever produced. If for some reason you haven’t seen it, Mr. Macintosh has you covered:
When this showed up last year, a little birdie told me that it was dynamically generated based on the user’s preferences, which explained why I couldn’t find it as a movie anywhere in the filesystem.
I’ve used it as my screen saver since then — set to Dark Gray — but I never made it around to digging into what makes it tick.
When looking for macOS Tahoe’s wallpapers, I was reminded of this project. I went digging through the SSD on my MacBook Pro, and my journey through Finder has yielded great fruit.
The screen saver is actually an Extension, residing at /System / Library / ExtensionKit / Extensions / WallpaperMacintoshExtension.appex (spaces added for legibility).
Right-clicking to “Show Package Contents” unveils a treasure trove:
I’m not really a programmer, but I know enough to see how this works. There is code telling those images how to move and interact with each other through a set of .program files. If the user has Macintosh set as their wallpaper, the screen saver slides to a stop once they return to the Desktop.
Here you can see IconGarden.program, resaved as plain text. Here is its corresponding image:
Here we have System6ControlPanel.program as plain text, and its image:
Interestingly, a bunch of the .program files include the string “Macintosh 40th Anniversary,” which helps explain how this project came to be.
For preservation purposes, I figured I should export the Macintosh images at a larger resolution for easy sharing. You can snag a .zip of them here.