Panic Blog

With 2020 now squarely behind us, it’s safe to say that the year didn’t go as anyone planned, but at Panic we somehow managed to release Nova as wildfires were approaching our homes, announce Nour: Play With Your Food for PS5, and update our apps for Big Sur, Apple M1, and iOS 14.

We have even more exciting projects in the works for this year, but to start, we’d like to present you with one very small gift.

Once upon a time, we made one of the earliest MP3 players for the Mac, Audion. We’ve come to appreciate that Audion captured a special moment in time, and we’ve been trying to preserve its history. Back in March, we revealed that we were working on converting Audion faces to a more modern format so they could be preserved.

Since then, we’ve succeeded in converting 867 faces, and are currently working on a further 15 faces, representing every Audion face we know of.

Today, we’d like to give you the chance to experience these faces yourself on any Mac running 10.12 or later. We’re releasing a stripped-down version of Audion for modern macOS to view these faces.

Now, this isn’t a full-fledged return of Audion. It can play music files and streams, but it doesn’t have playlists, and we’re not offering support for it. Its primary purpose is to view faces in the converted format. In addition, we’re releasing the source code to document how these faces work and an archive of converted faces.

Some Faces

Inside the face archive, you’ll find hundreds of great Audion faces. Some are more traditional music player interfaces; many mimicked the then-brand-new OS X, replete with pinstripes and brushed metal; and others were boldly glossy and skeuomorphic, a trend which, for a short time, seemed like it might be the future of GUI design. The TokyoBay face by Paul Johnson exemplifies this last aesthetic. Like many faces, it displayed track info on a glossy LCD with scanlines.

Of course, not all faces fell into these categories. The Face PP by Rudluph looks like it would fit right in at the Y2K Aesthetic Institute:

As with any themeable software, Audion got its fair share of holiday-themed faces. Bescherung, by Andy Pratioto, cleverly replaced the time display with animating Christmas lights, causing the lights to animate as the track plays:

In fact, many Audion faces really came alive when animating. Audion supported streaming music from the Internet, but it could take a long time to connect and buffer audio streams, during which time the UI would be static. To assure users that Audion had not frozen, it would play animations while connecting and streaming. Lots of face artists created delightful streaming animations, but I was surprised to find that Slap Happy by Chris Fayette contained a ten-second clip from Charlie Chaplin’s The Cure:

But it didn’t take animation to make a great skin. StickyAudion by Dr. Joseph A. Gardner disguised itself as a classic Mac OS sticky note, with the controls hidden in the text of the note:

This kind of interface is fun, but if you’re seeing it for the first time, it can take a minute to figure how how it works. Interface design over the last couple decades has focused on making GUIs as intuitive and easy to use as possible, and that’s one major reason why themeable software fell out of style. Some Audion faces took this to an extreme, hiding buttons in the design so you would have to click around the face to find where they were. But themeable software also allowed for unconventional GUI designs that remained usable while allowing artists to explore new directions for UI design. Contragravity by Margaret Trauth has always stood out to me as a fun face that is easy to use:

It’s also one of the very few faces that still has a working URL in its info field. Most of the faces contain links to expired domains or abandoned email addresses. Given that they were created around twenty years ago, this shouldn’t be surprising. Face artists put a lot of time and effort into their faces, and while it may be sad to think that all their work has largely vanished from the Internet, people change, discovering new interests and reinventing their Internet identities in the process.

Panic has also changed a lot over the same time period. We still develop some of the best Mac shareware around, but we’re also working on exciting things like Playdate, our handheld game system. This is only possible because, as a company, we’re always facing forward, looking for the next challenge. But Audion remains an important part of our past, and that’s why we’re so excited to bring these faces to life again.

Extras

But that’s not the end of the Audion preservation story!

After our March blog post, we got in touch with a few face authors who had some fun tidbits to share.

In 2001, Joel Day developed a third-party Mac app to create and edit Audion faces named FaceEdit. This app only runs on Classic Mac OS, but Joel has generously made a registered copy available for free — and notes that anyone who wants to pay for a registration code can send him a few dollars on GitHub sponsors. Make some faces!

In addition, an amazing long-lost piece of history: Paul Johnson, Author of the TokyoBay face featured earlier, did some work for Panic conceptualizing the default face for the cancelled Audion 4 and sent me this never-seen-before mock-up of it:

Thanks

Well, we hope you enjoyed this final look at Audion and its many faces on our blog. When we finish converting the remaining faces, we’ll post an update on our Twitter.

And here’s to 2021, which we can only hope will be bright and meaningful for all of you. Forward!