OS X Rancho Cucamonga
The butt end of a WWDC jape becomes a beautiful new wallpaper for macOS (and iOS too!)
A wallpaper based on a joke that got taken way too far. To get everyone up to speed, at WWDC14, in the early days of the transition from OS's named after big cats (Lion, Jaguar, Tiger, Leopard, etc.) to places in California, Craig Federighi joked about Apple's "Crack Marketing Team" driving around California in search of the next name for OS X. Before unveiling OS X Yosemite; Apple teased about considering OS X Oxnard, OS X Weed, and yes, OS X Rancho Cucamonga.
Rancho Cucamonga, just for context, is a relatively small city of under 200,000 in eastern California, nestled near the edge of the San Gabriel Mountains. Its lone Apple Store in town is Victoria Gardens, a place that several readers of this blog have proudly informed me that they worked at!
To give Rancho its due, rather than being the butt end of a WWDC joke, I wanted to see if I could create a beautiful macOS-style wallpaper of this locale. Short on time, Midjourney generated a simple wallpaper featuring a golden dune gradient and hazy blue mountain ranges off in the distance. I posted it, and people loved it, but I couldn't overlook that the quality of the Midjourney creation sucked. It was a 1024px image that I tried to upscale and tweak to look at good as possible, but no amount of clever manipulation could mask the fact that I was working with a very low-res foundation.
Left: Midjourney generated image; Right: My version created in Sketch.
So the next step was to recreate a version of this wallpaper entirely from scratch. Sketch was used to create the mountains and dunes, and Pixelmator Pro helped me add some shading, deband the image, and incorporate a vectorized tree at the vanishing point.
So, finally, I have a wallpaper that does right by Rancho Cucamonga. The wallpaper is available for Mac, iPad, and iPhone, with versions available both with and without a tree. Enjoy.
Download
Tree: iPad | Mac (6K) | MacBook Pro 16 | iPhone
w/o Tree: iPad | Mac (6K) | MacBook Pro 16 | iPhone
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