The Mac OS 10.6 Wish List: Number Two — Bring Back Classic Features!
November 13th, 2007From the very first day Mac OS X appeared on the scene, many of you clamored for the return of some of your most cherished Classic features. How could Apple possibly remove the so many of the things that made the Mac OS special?
Do you remember, for example, when there was no Apple menu, and the Apple logo stared at you from the center of the menu bar? Yes, that generated an outcry so loud that you can still almost hear the echoes.
Time sure flies when you’re having fun.
Over time, some of those features came back in different form. I remember when Steve Jobs demonstrated an updated version of the Apple menu, incorporating items that used to be in the Classic Mac OS’s Special menu, which made them system-wide. He even remarked about the possibility of multiple Finders and/or Finder alternatives, but I think he was just thinking out loud, since nothing came out of that speculative chatter.
Or maybe he was just trolling for some extra headlines, or to make Mac users give Apple millions of dollars in free publicity suggesting what form these changes might take.
So what was the original Apple menu like? Well, starting with System 7.0, you could add items to the menu simply by depositing them (or an alias) in the Apple Menu Items folder. They would immediately (or almost immediately) appear right in the Apple menu. Over time, there were third party “extensions” that would create sub-menus, and Apple acquired one of these for itself, renaming it Apple Menu Options.
But it’s now six years since Mac OS X was introduced, and the Apple menu remains largely unchanged. If you want to alter it to conform to the Classic version, you must add a third party system hack. As it is, aside from setting the number of Recent Items in the Appearance preference panel — which does very, very little to earn its name — the Apple menu is a hard-coded component without lots of outside help.
Now there’s nothing inherently wrong with a system hack. In fact, they serve the purpose of providing features Apple didn’t incorporate into the operating system, or left buried without a graphical user interface. But as Mac OS X is upgraded, they can cause troubles because the system capabilities they exploited might be changed or removed.
Consider what happens when you have an older version of Unsanity’s Application Enhancer installed and you do a straight Upgrade installation of Leopard. The “blue screen of death” phenomenon must surely have made Windows fanboys pleased as punch.
But let’s return to the Apple menu, since there are so many possibilities left untouched.
Why, oh why, can’t Apple find a way to make it just as configurable as the older version, using the world’s most advanced computer operating system? With all that fancy 3D eye-candy occurring, surely relics of an older operating system ought to be easy to incorporate. Or perhaps they can provide a better version, using all the system know-how they’ve acquired merging the technologies from Apple and NeXT. Well, maybe I’m being a trifle facetious here, but I just cannot understand how today’s Apple menu is superior to the old.
No doubt the lack of a configurable Apple menu represents a change of vision, with the Dock meant to replace its missing functions. Indeed, you can drag an application, file or folder to the Dock and have it function somewhat like the Apple menu of old, only you access it directly, rather than grab a pull-down menu. When you have displays spanning 24 inches and 30 inches, I can see where Apple might have a point here, assuming that’s their logic in abandoning the configurable Apple menu.
Then again, maybe most of you don’t care. Millions of Mac users never used anything but Mac OS X, and that number is growing exponentially every quarter, so the features of old that you and I grew accustomed to are no longer top priorities.
This is not to say that everything in the Classic Mac OS is necessarily outdated. It took a while, but the Data Detectors feature of Leopard — which “senses” names, dates, locations and phone numbers in your email — is an old Mac feature that I’m happy to welcome back. I can say the same for the enhancements to Leopard’s Sharing preference pane, which lets you configure users and shares, just like in the old days. Again, what was old is new again.
So I ask you, dear reader: Are there any features to which you grew accustomed in the Classic Mac OS that you’d like to see restored for Mac OS X?
These are serious issues, and the feeling of nostalgia shouldn’t be a part of it. After all, a lot has changed since Apple was a beleaguered company thought to be doomed to tiny niche status, or destined to fade away in short order. Today’s Apple is a multinational consumer electronics company with a market value that exceeds that of any PC hardware maker. Just placating some old timers like me isn’t a practical business decision. If a new feature is to be added to Mac OS 10.6, there has to be a good reason, and it has to be done with the typical Apple flourish, to stand out from the crowd.
And, in case, you’re wondering, I don’t think the Classic Mac features continue to be absent from Mac OS X because Steve Jobs hates older Macs and the older Mac operating systems. If he could be persuaded that Apple would sell more copies of a future version of Mac OS X with a specific feature, you can bet he’d get his developers working on it pronto.
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The square menubar corners (ala Mac OS 9.2) were recently restored in Leopard so now when inverting the screen one doesn’t see a little white or orange distraction in the corners. That’s nice.
Here’s hoping that something like the Scrapbook returns in a beefed up OS X friendly incarnation. While many apps have a stationery feature, it ties you to one app’s file format. Scrapbook was good for storing data snippets & templates that could be quickly repurposed by different apps.
Speaking of file formats, Apple needs to dig through it’s archives and make translators or filters or even just official docs available in Mac OS X to read some of their old, dying legacy file formats. I’ve had to go back to Mac OS 9 to use ResEdit to modify a Quicktime resource fork, shuffle fonts around into and out of font suitcases with Font/DA mover, try and find something that can read a PICT2 document, a Claris Resolve file, and an early Teach Text file. Now that AppleWorks was dropped from being supported in Mac OS X, the list of legacy file formats grows. I realize that there may have been strategic reasons not to release file formats to something like Hypercard or Claris CAD when they were discontinued, but c’mon we trusted our data to these formats. The least Apple can do is make a bridge to something that has a chance of being recovered or translated into a readable form today. Apple has decades of file formats that are still trade secrets, and many people still have data that’s rotting in these unusable formats today. Grr.
From NeXTStep, I’d like to see the return of a pop-up menubar. A configurable special click (such as the middle mouse button) anywhere on the screen would show a popup menu right under your mouse with the top level menus. Now that screens are growing huge, having a shortcut to the system menubar would help even more than back then when screens were much smaller.
Even though I’ve been working with Macs since the 1980’s, I have very few nostalgic memories of Classic. By the time Apple released 10.1, OS X was far more robust than Classic could ever be or had ever been, a fact I doubt many would argue with.
Classic used to crash at least once a day for me due to any number of reasons those nostalgic for it seem to conveniently forget. From the ever-aggravating extension conflicts to the ever-popular “Bomb” error dialogue box which could be caused by any infinite number of issues, classic had been a pain in the ass to deal with for years.
Not that it was Apple’s fault, but I remember when I worked for a publishing house and we sent all our files out on those notoriously temperamental Syquest disks (This was pre-internet – 1000 years ago!). It was always a crap-shoot if the disk would mount or not or if the SCSI connection (when it wanted to work) would crash OS 7.5. As most of you might recall, it didn’t take much.
Now that it’s mentioned, I do somewhat miss the old Apple menu, but honestly, until it was brought up in today’s post, I hadn’t thought about it for years. I do wish the Dock was much more configurable than it currently is, though…
Most everything I can think of has carried over into Mac OS X. So nothing comes to mind right off the bat. As far as the Apple menu goes, I don’t really care about being able to add stuff to it.
Back in the day I used to tuck away apps that I rarely use but were handy when I need them. In Mac OS X I accomplish this buy using DragThing, but any one could use the current Leopard doc with the stacks feature.
(Sorry, off topic)
One thing that bugs me is why isn’t the multiple users feature in the Apple menu? You can sleep, restart, shutdown and log out but have to travel to the other side of the screen to switch users. That doesn’t make sense to me. It should be all together. Plus my menu bar icon is crowded. 🙂
I agree with Will. I should point out that TeachText files are just raw text and should be readable by any text editor. And SimpleText files can be read by TextEdit, last I checked (several years ago).
http://www.macmaps.com/macosxnative.html#LOOKALIKE
John… yes I remember the good old days of Syquest disks, Jaz disks and of course the Zip disks and the “click of death”…. good times…. good times. And don’t get me started on SCSI termination. 🙂
Yes, those were the days, my friend. I thought they’d never end, and why would anyone want them back? 😀
Peace,
Gene
Windowshading! This was something in OS 9 where you could double-click on the title bar of window and the window would roll up, like a windowshade, into a skinny horizontal bar. With it you could have many, many windows open and available on your monitor and not have to send them to the dock and then look through a bunch of icons in the dock to find what you want.
I use Unsanity’s Windowshade X to bring back this useful functionality. I also use their Fruitmenu which returns the OS 9 and earlier Apple Menu functions, as you described, and more (Both of which are broken with Leopard–where is the update???).
However, as applications that modify the OS, many people have noted problems with them. I sure wish Apple would include these two features.
Hypercard. I’m sorry, and I’ve bought and tried everything that tries to replace it, including Revolution and SuperCard, but nothing does.
As you say, a third party solution carries risks, even if the developer is proactive about keeping things updated.
Peace,
Gene
Hypercard is the predecessor to HTML. As such a well conceived imagemap can be designed to function much like Hypercard. Look for GIF Imagemap builders.
>>Classic used to crash at least once a day for me due to any number of reasons those nostalgic for it seem to conveniently forget. From the ever-aggravating extension conflicts to the ever-popular “Bomb†error dialogue box which could be caused by any infinite number of issues, classic had been a pain in the ass to deal with for years.<<
This is classic – classic FUD. I’m sure there are people to whom Mac Classic was a buggy crash ridden monstrosity, but that wasn’t the case for me, and I expect, many others. My last Classic OS was 8.6 with Carbon 1.6. The reason I mention Carbon is that this extension added OSX-like functionality to OS 8.5 – 9.22, especially in memory management. Apps could ask the System for additional memory on demand in addition to the old scheme which was to allocate a large memory space upon app launch. I could run 48 to 72 hours on 2GB using intensive graphics apps, two browsers, a telnet client and file sharing. I now have an Intel Mac with 2GB and doing the same, but only using one browser, I go through memory in 24 to 36 hours. Some is reclaimed but not fast enough for the leakers. Yes, I can stop and restart apps, and doing that manage a week or ten days, but I have to watch memory use in the menu bar. If I let things go too far, I get a final kernel protection fault and a kernel panic, and obviously have to restart. No months of uptime here. Is it still better than being booted into 8.6? Yes, but 8.6 is not the hell hole others seem to think and Tiger 10.4 is not the miracle it ought to be. Force quit existed under 8.6 and it worked cleanly 99% of the time when it was necessary, maybe once or twice a week. Question, did I have to Force Quit under 8,6 more often than I do under OSX? Oddly enough, I have had to do so far more often under Tiger than I ever had to booted into Classic Mac. The caveat is, those who know how to manage resources and watch the state of their computer, have been as likely to have a good experience using a G4 booted into a classic Mac OS as using OS 10.4/5 on more recent hardware. I liked the pre-OSX experience and have done all I can to make Tiger visually and ergonomically similar – yes UnSanity got a wad of my cash.
I still miss the ability to drag Finder windows to the bottom edge and dock them as tabbed drawers. The level of practicality and customizability there was far greater than I realized, until Apple replaced it with the far more limited Dock, and numerous third parties offered up inferior substitute utilities. The Dock still doesn’t offer always-visible names, forcing the user to mouse over or rely on a small, hard-to-customize icon to distinguish the identity and purpose of a docked folder (or stack). Nor does the Dock provide a spacially-fixed arrangement of content, which is essential to forming lightning-fast habits for performing frequent tasks. And of course the Dock makes you interface with non-Finder icons in a non-Finder window, which is fine if the only task you want to perform is a click-and-launch… but I used to be able to drag files, label them, copy them, spacially arrange them, view their metadata… everything I do with files in the Finder… and then have the window automatically snap-back and dock itself when I move on to the next task. That was power they’ve never duplicated. Spaces has potential that I haven’t fully explored, but I don’t see it bringing back the exact same control I had under the classic OS.
I suspect you need to do some troubleshooting (Activity Monitor may help), because you’re not supposed to be having that difficult a time. I’m a developer, and my G5 (1GB RAM) ran fine for weeks at a time with Tiger, and it’s done the same with Leopard (starting with the later development seeds). I’ve never had to reboot because of memory leaks, and I’ve never had a kernel panic on a GM version of the OS. My Intel iMac has only ever been restarted for system updates.
I think FUD is a little harsh. With any version of classic Mac OS, I had to reboot frequently. But I also knew someone who ran a web server on a IIcx running System 7.1 for years (literally) without a reboot. Stability with classic Mac OS depended largely on the applications you ran.
Please note that there wasn’t any magic memory management code in Carbon. Carbon didn’t magically change anything for applications that were not explicitly converted to it — no Carbon code ran unless there was a Carbon-savvy application running. The later versions of classic Mac OS did feature incrementally improved memory management (as long as you had virtual memory enabled), but it was *always* possible to allocate memory outside of the application’s memory space. I suspect very few of the applications you ran were, in fact, Carbonized.
Edited to add:
Oh, I see you’re installing Unsanity’s stuff. Well, that’s one sure way to destabilize your system.
I miss the PUT AWAY command. I could drag files to the Desktop form any folder, work on them all day, then select them and choose PUT AWAY and they’d all be magically whisked away back to their original folders. Nice!
@ Yacko
“Force quit existed under 8.6 and it worked cleanly 99% of the time when it was necessary, maybe once or twice a week.”
holy crap, dude u are nuts. i used to love classic mac OS- until it turned- into the hellhole that was crashville USA. If you used force quit and thought u was safe, then i could sell you the golden gate bridge for thirty bucks, really 🙂 OMG i was so dying to stop using it, i suffered through the utter slowness of 10.0 just to get away from the crashes. and holy lord is was the greatest computing experience for me EVAR 🙂
extensions manager was a straight beeyach to deal with. if you were not knowledgeable in dealing with Mac issues, u were toast if your machine decided to go hogwire due to the lack of protected memory. 8.6 was really nice for a while, but update after update turned that and then OS9 into a steaming pile of unstable filth.
the funny thing is that it was still so much better than using the suckage that is windows. true story :>
I’ve been using Macs since 1992 (over 15 years) and started with System 7.
I honestly can’t say I miss ANYTHING about the Classic Mac OS.
The Classic what? 🙂
Seriously, I kept Classic and some older apps around for a while. One day I realized I hadn’t used them in a couple of years, and gave it all up.
I realize that’s not true for some people, of course, which means they must avoid Leopard and Intel-based Macs, or seek the third-party Classic emulators. But I’ve not heard much good stuff about compatibility and performance for those things.
Peace,
Gene
I have been around since 1988, system 4, I think.
I honestly can’t think of anything critical that was in Classic.
Printing was more reliable.
If there is anything at all it is this. It is application related.
I kept Photoshop 3.0 (1993) from in Classic till I switched to intel macbook.
Bought Photoshop Elements as a replacement, and would love to have Photoshop 3.0 back any time.
Elements is a lot more work to achieve fewer results.
Sorry.
I wish Apple would bring back the ability to just shade (label) the folder colors AND with the option of changing the label colors to what we want.
I also wish somebody (or even Apple) would implement a feature that worked like TASKMENUBAR for classic did.
Features of that sort don’t routinely come in maintenance updates. We’d have to add them to a 10.7 wish list.
Peace,
Gene
Can you tell us more about the latter?
Peace,
Gene
1) What are you doing to cause kernel panics? Tiger has been rock solid for me since I installed it…
2) Force Quit under Classic almost always resulted in a total system crash
Talk about a selective memory…
🙂
Yes, Force Quit was almost always a dangerous process.
As to kernel panics: I saw very few, but then I run some heavy-duty, system-demanding apps sometimes.
Leopard has been a champ so far.
Peace,
Gene
Ken, IIRC, the transition to the newer style Photoshop UI happened when Adobe moved from 4.0 to 5.0, circa 1995. Or maybe it was 3 to 4? Long time ago.
I’ll emphasize again that you folks having performance problems with Tiger or Leopard need to either do some troubleshooting or have someone else do some troubleshooting for you. The experiences you’re having are not normal, and you really shouldn’t need to reboot the OS in normal usage.
One way to start would be removing all the Haxies (probably requires a clean install).
And yes, the Force Quit dialog was frequently a first-class ticket to hangsville, and even if it wasn’t, you should have restarted anyway, because critical system data structures could be corrupt at that point. Classic Mac OS was not designed to allow the interruption of programs against their will. Really.
Two things come to mind:
print window
and
the ability to drag fonts in and out of font suitcases
I have been crying for the latter for years.
@ gopher:
“Hypercard is the predecessor to HTML. As such a well conceived imagemap can be designed to function much like Hypercard. Look for GIF Imagemap builders.”
Hypercard was capable of so doing so much more than imagemaps. And Javascript lacks the simplicity of Hypertalk.
The HyperTalk scripting language was easy to learn yet very flexible. The card/background/stack metaphor was powerful. HyperCard included an integrated layout editor, debugger, printed report capability, rudimentary flat file database, scriptable drawing primitives, and much more.
Hypercard had so much potential. It was to programming what the Mac was to computing: access to technological power with an easy learning curve. It was an attempt to blur the difference between users and developers, much as the iApps allow media consumers the ability to become media creators.
Hypercard is the only Classic application that I still use. I know of no other development environment that is as simple to begin using yet has so much depth. It shall be missed.
I still love the looks of it.
Not one of the Mac OS X themes that have tried to imitate it has really succeeded, because there was something about the measurements of everything that felt really, really fine.
Actually the only things I miss from the “good old days” is a nice little enhancement by Tiger Technologies called “Menuette” — what it did was replace the menu (File, Edit etc.) entries of the Finder or chosen apps with icons…! Which is really convenient for laptop users or others not having a 24″ screen… 🙂
I have been using Mac portables ever since the first PowerBooks and I really got to love this little space-saver and have been missing it ever since I switched to Mac OS X…! Even though we obviously do have ways of implementing icons in the menu bar of OS X no-one has come up with a similar hack yet…!? Too bad, really…
I think its about time Apple updated the file selector for picking files! I really miss Action files from OS 9, I use Default folder but it is not even in the same ball park as the old Action Files. I am not sure why Apple does not open up and allow 3rd party developers to “replace” the file selector or create a much more functional one.
You’re referring to the Open/Save dialogs. Action Files was, in large part, descended from Super Boomerang, which was the best enhancer of them all.
What can I say? I agree wholeheartedly.
Peace,
Gene