The Mac OS classic architecture definitely had some problems with its non-protected memory and cooperative multitasking, but what it _allowed_ were extensions that could really get in there and muck around with things… and I looovvvved the zaniness that provided. To name a few:
- ResEdit! - Extensions that could seriously improve your computer's performance like RamDoubler or SpeedDoubler - That extension that made Oscar the grouch climb out of the trash can and sing a little ditty when you emptied the trash - The talking moose was fun for about 15 minutes, but still, I love the attitude. - After Dark! - Easter eggs like that "secret about box" text clipping thing that pulled up the pirate flag flying over the Apple Campus. - Playful messaging like "Installing System Morsels", or Sim City 2000's "Reticulating Splines" - Even the iconography was more playful—that little bloated mac icon in the Memory control panel next to Virtual Memory comes to mind
I miss the crew of developers, capabilities, and playfulness we lost in transitioning to OSX, but am thrilled that tiny fragments of this playfulness seem to be returning.
Welcome back Clarus! Moof!
I too miss that sort of whimsy and playfulness–I don’t think it’s inherently incompatible with modern expectations of professionalism/accessibility/security but it definitely seems to have been lost from most software these days.
Edit: found the extension! http://www.wildbits.com/gravite/
> I too miss that sort of whimsy and playfulness–I don’t think it’s inherently incompatible with modern expectations of professionalism/accessibility/security but it definitely seems to have been lost from most software these days.
Agreed completely but every now and then it still pops up. Recently, Notchmeister [0]
[0]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/notchmeister/id1599169747
What's so strange about this is that, as that playfulness has been lost, the software has, in many ways, moved in a direction that feels more childishly cartoonish. It seems the aim is now to make all computing feel fun and friendly (even when it perhaps ought to be more serious or economical), which has, ironically, stripped all the charm out of the experience by inundating us with bright colors and childsafe corners.
Small, unexpected, thoughtful moments and Easter eggs like those described in this thread are like a small piece of chocolate after a healthy meal. What we have in most software now (Apple is by no means the only company guilty of this) is more like a diet comprised entirely of candy.
The weird part is most current attempts of this are actually really bad at it past initial surface appearances.
Minimalist and “content-first’ UIs look great in screenshots and I guess they prevent new users from getting overwhelmed, but they also hide all the features in a way I find quite hostile. We have an absolute wealth of pixels in our displays today, but tons of software makes you decipher abstract line icons to work out what it can actually do.
The Mac thankfully still has the escape hatch of the menu bar, which almost universally allows you to browse and search all performable actions (and see their keyboard shortcuts inline!), but mobile operating systems don’t even have a touch-centric equivalent of tooltips.
had me chuckle
This was responsible for my little sister completely erasing a 20 MB hard drive one file at a time.
To be fair they did come awfully close to that point before Steve came back and reinvigorated the place.
That sentiment was not entirely misplaced at the time.
(Oh, and all USB-C/Thunderbolt docking stations have these adapters)
Sadly, there’s a reason why we can’t have nice things…
No memory protection, no multitasking (not even threads!), more minimalistic than the competition at the time in many ways in its core features – but on the flip side, extremely extensible in almost every way.
As I later learned, PalmOS was heavily inspired by Mac OS!
I would pay a frankly distressing amount of money for reproductions of After Dark screensavers, even if it was just videos I can set my TV to play when it gets tired.
They want the Mac to be great, too! If this was strictly playing on nostalgia it would have been a bit PR feature, or at least called out in WWDC. But instead it's just dropped in as an easter egg. Such a great sign.
So then how does one explain the unending UI regressions with every single major update? This whole system preferences thing for example? The terrible, terrible toolbars combined with window titles? The borderless buttons (with borders being an accessibility feature)? The utter disregard of the pixel grid? Everything else slowly becoming ever more un-desktop?
That's easy: not everyone agrees they're regressions.
Strategy Tax. They have a bigger strategy they are pursuing to align iOS<>MacOS. This is the big ecosystem play that raises ARPU and improves customer loyalty. This means standardization of UI to improve approachability for iOS users, who outnumber MacOS users considerably but whom are less loyal customers than combined iOS+MacOS users.
There's a secondary argument about moving off ObjC and code maintenance, since they want to gain the value of more modern language & to have new devs be able to jump on old products. This means every part of MacOS & every app is probably slated to be rewritten in Swift & SwiftUI as time goes on.
Do you remember what the battery icon in System Preferences looked like in the first beta of Mac OS 12? It's a beta. Give it some time. It's not out yet.
Lack of critical thinking, patting too much on the back of ourselves and inability to make tough decisions is a general malaise in Big Tech.
When companies are too focused on other things and not enough on the fundamentals, this is what happens.
Good to know it wasn't just me. I also expected it to be an installer that let me choose a different volume to install on.
The process didn’t give me an installer, it just jumped to the volume building process. TBH I kinda knew it was messed up, but after cancelling and trying again, I just let it go.
I didn’t see any options in the dev site to pull down a full installer.
My M1 is fairly new, so I have recent practice reinstalling Big Sur from scratch if necessary.
Got it at Susan Kare’s shop: https://kareprints.com/products/copy-of-moof-the-dogcow-on-g...
I still have a set of the 6 color Apple rainbow logo fridge magnets from that day.
I reverse engineered the asset catalog format for a bit recently, hoping to be able to unpack and repack existing ones to create system appearances (themes/skins — these also come as .car files, and you can load one as an NSAppearance object and then apply it to your app/window/view).
If it says it's a PDF, then it must be an actual PDF as a "raw data" rendition. I did successfully extract some with nothing but my own code. But, there are no PNGs present in .car files; as of Monterey, bitmap images use a proprietary undocumented compression format called "deepmap2". I wasn't able to exactly reconstruct how it works because my skills of native code reverse engineering are lacking (or am I not using Ghidra correctly to get at least somewhat sensible code out of it?), but I did find the related functions in the vImage framework inside Accelerate.framework.
I write and think in Markdown and there was something about seeing it laid bare that I enjoyed. Wouldn’t want it on every site, but for something a bit different, call me a fan of this one.
I suspect this _is_ a vector format, and they’re using the Xcode 9+ features for a scalable image at runtime. I’ve never tried to extract the data back, it wouldn’t surprise me if they’re optimized for themselves, since in theory apple’s frameworks are the only “consumer” of the compiled asset catalog.
Unless you mean in a very abstract way, then, yes, both are related to nostalgia.
Weird, on my MacOS (12.3 Monterrey) I think I always see a thumbnail of the actual page I'm previewing there?
Surely they haven't taken a step back to showing a generic clarus icon instead in new version of OS? That would be weird. I must be confused about what he's talking about.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogcow
> The dogcow symbol and "Moof!" are proprietary trademarks of Apple.
Thanks to Wikipedia contributors and to Archive.org!
https://web.archive.org/web/20040202021201/http://developer....
