I expected DragThing to disappear with the birth of OS X and its accompanying Dock. Among those features was the ability to launch items via keyboard shortcuts, store and retrieve text clippings, save docks as drawers that pop-out when you move your cursor to the edge of the screen, and allow you to preview certain kinds of files from within a hierarchical menu. Instead he supported and added more features to the utility. Unlike with lot of these utilities, Thomson didn’t sell it to a large company or give up on it. The Macs I use today employ that same configuration.Īnd developer James Thomson kept up with it. ![]() In my case, I created one dock for my currently running applications and another for applications I used routinely. Beyond being a way to launch applications with a single click, the docks you created could be used to access or launch a variety of items-folders, devices on a local network, servers, URLs, and so on. I liked what I saw, and for a variety of reasons. In those days, it was available as shareware and could be downloaded from I believe it was our own Jason Snell (he was about 8 years old at the time) who one day suggested, “If you’d like a dock launcher, you should take a look at (With OS 9, Apple instituted its own single-button launching utility aptly called Launcher.) I tried every dock utility I could lay my hands on. ![]() Similar to the dock you find in today’s Mac OS X, these tools allowed you to place your favorite applications in an always-present window and launch them with a single click. It was around this time that dock utilities became popular. And while that was a better solution than rooting around in one folder or another seeking a favorite application, it still required a fair bit of mousing around and dealing with menus that could be quite clumsy. (Yes, this was a really big deal at the time). Now Menus component, which placed hierarchical menus within the Apple menu. In those dockless days, launching an application was pretty tedious: Dig down into one folder or another, double-click the item you sought, and you were on your way. One of the areas that developers found particularly interesting was application launching. ResEdit to place the ugliest fonts imaginable in the menu bar, and, oh, thoseįlying toasters. You could slap themes on your Mac sixteen ways to Sunday, use Under Mac OS 9 and earlier, those developers had greater opportunities to muck with the Finder and low-level functions on the Mac. Third-party developers made some interesting efforts to deal with that clumsiness. Broadband? Is 2400 baud broad enough for you, buddy? In short, powerful and cool though my Power Mac 6100 and, later, Power Computing Power Tower 180e, seemed at the time, the Mac OS was still on the clumsy side. You say you’d like to share a printer with the other computers in your home? Take a class. What, you want your Mac to operate for an entire day without crashing? Dreamer. Oh sure, you still double-clicked this and dragged that, but things we take for granted just didn’t exist in those days. (Apple changed its OS naming scheme from System This to Mac OS That when it moved from System 7.5 to Mac OS 7.6.) In these earlier days of the Mac’s operating system you couldn’t fling a brick in any compass direction without hitting some utility that attempted to make that operating system better (or more attractive or, in far too many cases, goofier).įor those who weren’t there, the pre-OS X Mac OS was quite a different beast. In truth, Apple has left a long trail of OS revisions in its wake-from System 1.x to Mac OS 9.x. SCO - 80+ HD Tutorials & 6 mo.For many people-particularly those who’ve come to the Mac after first using an iOS device-there was and always has been Mac OS X. InEventScript - Trigger scripts in InDesignĪppZapper - Fun application uninstallation ![]() If you're bursting with holiday cheer, buy them all! Just be sure to enter coupon code MACSANTA when you order. Purchase as many applications as you like. Software is a great way to show that special someone you care, and with instant delivery it's the perfect last-minute gift. Thanks to MacSanta, you can save 20% off applications from all 104 companies below! Just use coupon code MACSANTA to save through December 25th. Read the classic poem: "A Visit From MacSanta" You don't know MacSanta? He brings big savings during the holiday season!
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