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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@John Bligh:
“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.”
I’ll grant you that. But this discussion is about abandoned features. Many UI changes were gratuitously made having nothing to do with stabilty. Not all of them were for the better.
I miss not having to think about file extensions (I know you can hide them in OS X, but its seems that you are asking for trouble if you do; If programs are going to pay attention to them, then I need to see them too).
I miss simple icons that can be quickly identified by shape alone. Photorealistic icons are pretty but just add visual clutter. Am I the only one that sometime confuses the iPhoto and Preview icons in the dock?
I miss being able to organize my applications on my hard disk as I see fit, and not having to worry that they won’t be found by installers when updating programs. (I think I read that Apple may have finally fixed this in Leopard).
I miss Put Away (previously mentioned by fam).
I miss the spacial finder which enforced only one window per folder. Before OS-X, the window WAS the folder. I find the column browser useful but it should be a separate window, not a folder view option. Every folder should have its most recent window size, position, viewing style, column set, icon position etc. reliably saved. I want my folders to feel like familar places, not just lists of items without visual continuity.
I miss not being able to work close to the edges of my screen without worrying about the dock inadvertently launching an unwanted application. Hiding the dock is no use as it unexpectedly pops out to intercept clicks when you graze the edge of the screen. Give us a way to make the dock stay hidden until we really want to see it!
I miss being able to drag windows by their borders. Screens are much bigger these days. We can certainly afford to sacrifice a few pixels per window for a draggable border.
I miss the power-user feature of being able to open a deeply nested item in the Finder by drilling down. OS X lets you place items in deeply nested folders in this fashion, but for some inexplicable reason has dropped support for opening items. In classic Mac OS, you could “click-and-a-half” on a folder or disk. It would open. With the mouse still down you could hover over a subfolder and it would open (closing the parent window), etc. Eventually you would hover over the file you were interested in and release, thus opening the file. Its enclosing folder window would remain open to preserve context.
There’s probably more but I have long since given up hope. I suppose I should be grateful that the Next engineers preserved as much of the original Mac interface as they did.
I miss Gerbils, the little program that let you check out QuickDraw 3D. You could build a little rollercoaster track and watch the Gerbil zoom around on it. Bring that back! I think it’s the key to dominating over Windoze.
After a bit more thought, I have a few things to add…
Publish & Subscribe — The idea was that Mary could write some text, and Joe could draw a picture, and these works could be “published” as works in progress. Bill could subscribe to each of these and place them in the newsletter he’s working on. If Joe or Mary update their work, the changes cascade to Bill’s newsletter. This suffered from two problems: poorly coordinated ownership rules (whose Mac is in charge?) and a very naive interface (what if Bill doesn’t want changes after a certain point? what if Mary’s diatribe grossly exceeds the length Bill expected?) It now seems that with dot Mac, a wiki being built into Leopard Server, RSS feeds, and the internet in general, the technical side is greatly simplified. The user interface problems are still significant, but Publish & Subscribe is still a very good idea that could finally come to fruition under Mac OS X if the effort was made to try again.
Commando — When Apple first had a go at combining Unix and the Mac OS in A/UX, one of the tools they came up with was a “command line helper” application called Commando to put a friendly Mac GUI on the unfriendly Unix man pages. With most common shell commands you could pull up a graphical dialog and construct the various options arguments and switches to enter. When you closed the dialog, the options you configured were turned into properly typed text on the command line waiting for you to press return to actually execute it. Commando could be brought back as its own tool or perhaps implemented as a plugin architecture in Terminal that developers could write plugins for. (I don’t know how similar A/UX’s Commando was to MPW’s Commando; they may or may not be similar tools.)
Desk Accessories on the Desktop (Dashbook?) — Widgets are great, and having a “space” like Dashboard to segregate them is a good idea for performance, but there are one or two Dashboard widgets I’d really like to use and intermingle in regular Mac windows like I could do with Desk Accessories or Sherlock. Rather than get rid of Dashboard, Apple could make an app (I call it “Dashbook”) that would let you pick out a widget and run it among the regular windows. You could have multiple widget windows open in this app, but they’d all share the same process. Of course, you can technically do something like this now with Safari, but it’s a pain to set up and some events (like sync) aren’t properly triggered.
Interface Skins — With the discovery of CoreUI in the private frameworks in Leopard, it seems like Apple may one day allow a beefed-up, resolution-independent, appearance manager to return. While I thought themes like Drawing Board and Techno were very neat (though much less fond of Gizmo), I’d see this as something very important for Universal Access. In optimal viewing conditions, I like Aqua but there are some times I’d like to be able to turn the interface into something as stark, clean, and readable as the original Mac OS interface. Others have been experimenting with “night vision” types of interfaces that use red on black. I don’t see this as high priority, but it’s much more than just a toy.
Why can’t we all just agree that not everyone had the same experience with pre-X Mac OSes?
I started with Macs about 1986, and ran the gamut between lab computers in various classrooms and dorms, to machines at different jobs that I had varying control over. They were all over the map when it came to stability.
Nowadays, stability on OS X only seems to be a problem when hardware is flaky.
Back then, it was hard to narrow it down to that. There were always font problems, or memory and disk corruption, extension conflicts — and before that, corrupted CDEVs and resource fork corruption. It’s always a function of luck and how well maintained your system was.
Anyway — when I first read this article, I couldn’t think of anything I wanted back from pre-X OSes. The comments, however, remind me of why it took me a long time to get used to 10.0 when I finally switched to it.
Strange that Apple continues to ignore the best practices for human interface design, which were almost all pioneered at that company. There are articles all over the place explaining Fitts’ Law and the benefits of a spatial finder, but Apple still gets this stuff wrong — seemingly just for the sake of being different from how it used to be.
My ultimate MacOS 9 setup, just before I switched, made great use of well-organized folder tabs (with aliases viewed as buttons — my own makeshift At Ease, kind of) and control strips. I also used “GoMac” and Default Folder.
I’d love to see a truly spacial Finder, complete with folder tabs and button views, and have the multi-pane viewer act more like an application unto itself.
The Control Strip and modules were really just a substitute for a better top-of-the-screen configurable menu bar, so I don’t mourn its loss. Wide screens now allow all the CS behavior I used to use (CPU monitoring, sound level control, battery info, screen prefs) on the top of the screen, with its Fitts-infinite target height.
I’ve never been a big fan of collapsible menubars, but allowing the option to turn it on would be fine. Ditto multi-edge grippability.
Mac OS X Leopard is arguably the best OS ever, but there’s always improvement to be made — and not just in the eye-candy department (I’m looking at you, shiny-ass-Web-2.0 Dock.)
Well, it’s beginning to look like some concepts from OpenDoc might be recycled into Bento, by FileMaker.
Someone elsewhere suggested doing a Google search for OpenDoc Bento. I added Gluon as well, since that was Bento’s codename at FileMaker (see Daniel Jalkut’s exploration of Bento at http://www.red-sweater.com/blog/435/filemaker-goes-indie). Guess what is out there? An article titled “Gluons and the Cooperation between Software Components” that mentions OpenDoc’s Bento format, and mentions that “A Bento object contains a collection of properties and properties contain values which are the placeholders where data is actually stored.” Sound familiar?
http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~scg/Archive/OOSC/PDF/Pint95bGluons.pdf
OpenDoc had quite a bit of promise – bringing back parts of it could be very useful.
Apple, bring back Locations!!
There were many things that made Mac laptops better than Windows. Control Strip, Sleep that works, and more.
One hugely useful thing was Locations. You could have a work Location – when you switched to it, your network settings changed, your default printer changed, you sound MUTED (whew!), perhaps a document or two opened up, and more! Then, when you went home, just switch Locations and everything goes back to what makes sense for Home.
There are some third-party tools that do this, but this really should be brought back – it was part of the system before, and it makes alot of sense to have it there, built-in.
What I miss most:
-Classic Labels: subtly coloring the icons, instead of that scream queen non-configurable thing we’ve got now.
-Windowshade: that experimental Minimize-in-place feature that never went live would do, too.
-Tabbed folders: oh the joy…! Can you imagine how grand “smart tabbed folders” woud be, by the way?
-Non-truncated filenames in small icon view: being able to reduce icon size to a minimum and setting filenames as single right side lines… without truncating them by means of an ellipsis.
-The way one did selections in List View: just the same as if one was in icon view. So one could start by clicking on empty space and drag-select until touching some filename or icon to select it. From Panther onwards List View behaves as a List Field, which limits its usefulness UI gesture-wise in many ways.
-And the whole robustness of its windows’ visual state (icon sizes, placement, labels, etc).
-Tabbed Folders [I still use it on my OS 9 machines]
-Windowshade
And what ever happen to the QTVR Authoring Studio?
and QD3D support
Apple did Incorporate some parts such as ADD [Apple Data Detectors] from OpenDoc..check the services menu!
Note to Apple OS Developers: Must Have items in 10.6:
-Tabbed Folders
-Windowshade
-Customizable Apple Menu
And one more thing[As Steve would say]: Why are there more Video Card options for Classic Macs than todays Modern Machines???
I miss the eyeballs that would follow your cursor. And how many days till Christmas. And what’s-his-name’s phone number.
Okay, I’m kidding about missing those features, but even with the bouncing and spinning and water-drops, there was still an element of fun that OS X misses. It’s splashier, easier to use, more stable, and better in many ways, but not as much fun.
I’ve been a steady Mac user since early 1992 (System 7.0.1) and there’s not much, if anything, that I miss from the classic Mac OS – I restart my G4 in 9.2.2 at times, and it feels severely dated. Customizeable Apple menu – well, I’m perfectly content in having the Dock replacing it. I never used Windowshade or tabbed folders – nowadays I like and use Exposé a lot, and can’t imagine using a computer without it any more and so on. The only thing I would like to see is the return of the application menu that was possible to tear off, where I can see what applications I have open with a quick glance, but I guess that’s about it (I find it harder to see what is running by glancing at the Dock).
The thing is, Apple was hearty and fun and bubbly until suddently it went all Gray-white-zen-serious on us. Every new try to do playful feels rather false since then.
@Snafu, I feel exactly like that.
I found Launcher to be a really useful tool for “regular people” – I often set it up on friends’ machines, and my boss couldn’t have managed without it! The best thing was you could set up groups of Launcher items, so he could choose from “Business” or “Internet” or “Blank Documents” or “Recent Invoices”, for example.
@ Dan Shockley:
I think OS X does have locations, doesn’t it? (It’s in the Apple menu) But it only affects network settings. I never used the old version, but it sounds really useful. I imagine people in offices with both a “slacking off” and a “looking busy” location set…
The MPW Commando dialog is identical to the A/UX Commando dialog. They probably shared the same code.
TextMate’s tm_dialog command line tool is probably the modern equivalent. It’s actually more powerful than Commando, because it uses nibs and specifies interaction through Cocoa Bindings. And you can write scripts to interact with the nibs. It doesn’t directly call command-line tools, but it allows you to build sophisticated UI for scripts which call them.
If someone put the plugin portion into a standalone application shell, it would be incredibly powerful tool outside of TextMate. tm_dialog is entirely open source, so it’s not impossible. There aren’t actually any hard internal dependencies on TextMate’s internal API.
Here, here! Yes, all I’ve ever wanted Mac OS X to have “put back” into it from MacOS 9 days are the configurable Apple Menu, Window Shade, and to have the Finder windows come to the front when the Desktop is clicked upon. All simple things that once made the Mac a Mac at its heart. C’mon, please Apple, put ’em back in a 10.6.x point update soon?…