Apps and tools that keep old Macs useful — from PowerPC to Intel, with a few classic Mac ideas brought to Apple Silicon. Why throw away a Mac that still works? True sustainability is using what we have.
A language pack for Aquafox that adds Japanese UI support to the PowerPC Mac browser.
Can everyone actually read English? Even if you can, does it click intuitively? I can't. I studied for entrance exams, memorized the words — but the moment they string together into a sentence, it might as well be a cipher. Made this for people like me.
A classic Finder-style file manager that recreates the Tiger-to-Snow Leopard experience on modern Macs.
What an old-timer who left the field for good ended up building, after digging into why a brand-new M2 Mac still felt like something was missing.
A file browser for turning a PowerPC Mac G4 into an SMB3-ready NAS-like file server.
Made so PowerMac G4s, iBook G4s, and (untested) iMac G5s can keep earning their keep. Old data still sitting on them, and I wanted to see it in the environment it was actually made in — that's the real reason.
A self-contained Perl agent that lets you talk to an AI from the Terminal on a PowerPC Mac (Tiger) — supports Claude, Gemini, and local LLMs.
Wanted AI to run on even the oldest machine I own. That's the whole reason this exists. The story's in the overview tab.
A menu bar app that lets PowerPC Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) read, write, and mount exFAT drives.
Borrowed a USB drive full of old data from someone. Plugged it into my PowerMac and got “Can't read this. Format it?” — like hell I will! This app is that anger, given form.
An ultra-lightweight 3-pane web reader for PowerPC Macs (Tiger), built without WebKit.
Macs don't break as easily as you'd think. Sure, I used to maintain them properly back when they were work machines. But there are still Macs sleeping in the corner of a storage room. Write them off? No way, too good to waste. This is the one I forced a use back into.
A relocatable, unofficial build of CPython 3.12.11 + pip for PowerPC Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger).
3.12 was the one version that just didn't exist — everything above and below it did. Python versions quietly change more than people think, and I wanted this exact one on my PowerBook G4, so I built it myself. Burned a full day compiling and chasing down errors.
A lightweight Quick Look substitute for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger — select a file in the Finder, press Space, and a preview appears (images, PDF, text, Office and more).
I keep using Tiger because it's light, and I really wanted this far-too-convenient feature while I'm at it. I thought about patching my way up to Leopard, but I wanted to build it on Tiger, on the underpowered machine as it is. Plenty of updates still to come, but it already handles a decent set of formats.
Refreshes an old Mac's root certificate store, with signature verification even over plain HTTP — though the real-world payoff turned out limited (details in the overview).
Started from "if it's just an expired certificate, why not fix the certificate." Turned out not to be the magic fix I hoped for. Still thought the mechanism underneath was worth keeping around, so I'm publishing it as something others might reuse as a part.
A menu-bar app that turns ⌘+trackpad movement into scrolling on PowerPC Macs whose trackpads don't support two-finger scroll.
The trackpad on an iBook or PowerBook doesn't do two-finger scrolling like a modern Mac. Working without a mouse meant constantly grabbing the scrollbar by hand — small friction, but real. So I just made holding ⌘ and moving the trackpad scroll instead.
A lightweight AI agent for Intel Macs (Mavericks–High Sierra) that switches between Claude and Gemini for both casual chat and coding help. Its default "Note" mode feels like writing back and forth in a single shared notebook.
Started with an old Intel Mac I'd basically stopped using. I assumed a modern AI agent just wouldn't run on it — turned out I was wrong. Once it did run, I wanted it to be something I could talk to without worrying about the bill, so that's what I built.
What breaks on today's networks, and how to bring an old Mac back to life.
A MX Linux-based distro that recreates the simple UI of Mac OS X 10.4–10.6.
This is a personal, non-commercial project. Server, domain, testing hardware, and development costs all come out of my own pocket. If something here has been useful to you, a coffee helps keep the project going.
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