This is so great. The 90s/pre OS-X Apple (the "BuT tHeREs No SOFtWaRe!" and "ApPLe is GoING tO DiiEE" Apple) had a sense of playfulness in their UIs that was largely lost when they became the Apple we know today.<p>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:<p>- 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<p>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.<p>Welcome back Clarus! Moof!
Sure, this is a sweet little hit of nostalgia -- but it's also symptomatic of just how far Apple's come (back) with the Mac, and why. It's clear that we're way, way over the doldrums of the butterfly keyboard, abandoned Mac Pro, "continues to be a product in our line-up" years. Little things like this, little acknowledgements of the past and the Mac community, suggest to me why: the people in charge of the Mac are now people who _grew up with it_, who love it, and who have that same nostalgia as (some) of us outside Apple.<p>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.
> The keen-eyed among you may notice that although, it had a .pdf extension in assetutil info, I’ve given it here as a PNG. I was confused by this too, but upon closer inspection I believe the PNG is what ships with the OS. Although the .car format is not documented, you can still open it up in a hex viewer and learn a bit about what it contains. Looking through it, there appears to be some metadata for each file, followed by the image data itself.<p>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).<p>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.
Side note: What an odd webpage style. Makes some things look like they're markdown, but they're actually added with css ::before and ::after. Plus I found the link style very distracting and unnecessary (since browsers already have built-in ways to show you the URL of a link).
> As assetutil showed, there are multiple entries for ClarusSmooth2.pdf—and one of them is followed by data that starts with the PDF file format header (%PDF). But, unfortunately, extracting that data into a separate file seems to result in a blank PDF. And I don’t know enough about the format to figure out whether there is any vector data in it, or if it truly is empty.<p>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.<p>ref: <a href="https://useyourloaf.com/blog/xcode-9-vector-images/" rel="nofollow">https://useyourloaf.com/blog/xcode-9-vector-images/</a>
I love it. It’s about time they brought some personality back to the Mac. I miss things like the startup chime (it’s back!), the backlit Apple logo, the pulsating power light on the iMac G4 when the system was sleeping, etc. Apple got to a point in the early 2010s where they started stripping away these things, and I’m glad they’re somewhat on their way back.
Is it related at all to Apple's recent Low Resolution design contest?<p><a href="https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=3sgp4ps7" rel="nofollow">https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=3sgp4ps7</a>
For more details about Clarus, the Wikipedia page is packed:<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogcow" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogcow</a><p>> <i>The dogcow symbol and "Moof!" are proprietary trademarks of Apple.</i>
> I, er, accidentally updated my laptop to the beta<p>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.
I'm reminded of when Jobs got rid of the Icon Garden to discourage nostalgia.<p><a href="http://clarus.chez-alice.fr/c_applegarden.php" rel="nofollow">http://clarus.chez-alice.fr/c_applegarden.php</a>
I have a print of Moof the Dogcow on my wall and it is lovely.<p>Got it at Susan Kare’s shop: <a href="https://kareprints.com/products/copy-of-moof-the-dogcow-on-green" rel="nofollow">https://kareprints.com/products/copy-of-moof-the-dogcow-on-g...</a>
Really wish I could dig up the old HyperCard stack that first released Tech Note #31. I was so excited when I found it in the Resource Fork of one of stacks on the Apple Developer CD...<p>Thanks to Wikipedia contributors and to Archive.org!<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20040202021201/http://developer.apple.com/products/techsupport/dogcow/tn31.html" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20040202021201/http://developer....</a>
> That dialog shows Clarus on the page preview in every app.<p>Weird, on my MacOS (12.3 Monterrey) I think I always see a thumbnail of the actual page I'm previewing there?<p>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.