Glider Classic Returns
Glider Classic was a re-write of my game, Glider. I wrote it in 2011 or so. I wasn't trying to remake the original game from 1990 exactly as it had been. Instead I considered that the hardware was now fast enough to easily scroll the background as the paper airplane moved through the house. I also decided that your paper glider ought to be able to survive bumping into a balloon—an in other ways made it a little more forgiving.
Surprising to me, I was able to scale it (and the UI) to the iPhone and iPad as well as the Macintosh.
It was on the App Store for a few years. At some point a version of MacOS and iOS came along that broke me (or I broke them). If you care about the technical details, it involved the way the OS's OpenGL view was handled. I don't know what happened—perhaps something like the Apple's Retina Display came along that required OpenGL changes.
In any event, Glider Classic had graphical problems that forced me to pull it from the App Store.
What changed in 2026? Weirdly, I decided to put Claude (the LLM, AI) on it. I pasted code into Claude's context window and asked, "What issues do you see?" Very quickly problems involving mixing coordinates systems (points versus pixels) lead to a series of fairly small changes that brought Glider Classic back from the dead.
