hoakley General, Macs, Technology

Solutions to Saturday Mac riddles 344

I hope you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 344. Here are my solutions to them.

1: Iron, copper, mercury, shaders.

Click for a solution

Metal

Iron, copper, mercury, (all three are metals) shaders (it’s a low-level 3D graphics, shader and compute API for Apple silicon GPUs).

2: Silica successor to 3 went from 2D to extreme.

Click for a solution

Quartz

Silica (the mineral quartz) successor to 3 (it progressively replaced QuickDraw in Mac OS X) went from 2D (Quartz 2D) to extreme (Quartz Extreme, with hardware acceleration).

3: Classic climbing extender replaced by 2 and all but vanished now.

Click for a solution

QuickDraw

Classic (it was the graphics library and API in Classic Mac OS, and initially written by Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld) climbing extender (a quickdraw) replaced by 2 and all but vanished now (in Mac OS X, Quartz 2D has replaced it, with barely a trace left in modern macOS).

The common factor

Click for a solution

They have each been key parts of the Mac’s graphics system.

I look forward to your putting alternative cases.