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Comment by Lammy | Hacker News Reader

Not to diminish the super-coolness of modern FOSS for Classic Macs, but as a fun historical fact the Mac OS X Dock was itself inspired by a Classic Mac application called DragThing.

https://www.dragthing.com/english/tenyears.html sez “The reason there wasn't much DragThing development between 1998 and 2000 is because I was then part of the team working in secret on the Finder and Mac OS X Dock at Apple. I felt then that the Dock would ultimately replace DragThing. However, for a variety of reasons, I left Apple shortly after Aqua and the Dock were announced in January 2000, and very little of my code survives in the current Dock.”

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Copying [dead] reply here so I can reply to it: “This simply can’t be true. The dock first appeared in NextStep 1.0, which was released in 1989, six years before dragthing 1.0 appeared in 1995.”

The NeXT Dock was removed from Rhapsody and Mac OS X DP1/DP2. The Mac OS X DP3 Dock was a new creation.

See http://www.rhapsodyos.org/misc/docs_and_faqs/Misc_FAQs.html which recommends a third-party dock called Fiend —

Q: Is the OPENSTEP Dock going to be available in Rhapsody?

A: It is actually still there in 5.0 to a degree. In 5.1 and later it has been replace with the Applications Menu (but you can get it back using Fiend[0]). Also you have the option to use the minimize to tile for windows like in NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP instead of window shade.

[0]: http://www.rhapsodyos.org/misc/fiend/fiend_1.html

The reply wasn’t dead, and you’re confirming my point.

James Thomson worked on the OSX dock but dragthing had nothing to do with inspiring it.

It was dead. Someone vouched it so we can now see it.

It was never dead, and nobody vouched for it. HN just has delayed visibility for postings from new accounts.

It’s unfortunate that Lammy hasn’t admitted their error.

_This_ comment was dead until I vouched for it.

Not sure what's going on here.

> a fun historical fact the Mac OS X Dock was itself inspired by a Classic Mac application called DragThing.

This simply can’t be true. The dock first appeared in NextStep 1.0, which was released in 1989, six years before dragthing 1.0 appeared in 1995.

James Thomson may have worked on the dock in OSX, but he did not inspire it.

I loved DragThing and hate the Dock. They look superficially similar but they function quite differently. I don't remember the details because it's been too long since I used DragThing, but in DragThing it just worked smoother and more intuitively.

I used to do some hack that made the Dock invisible because I found it to be intrusive and useless. IOW I preferred using the Mac with no docklike thing at all to using the Mac with the Dock. Apple long ago made my hack stop working so now I just live with the stupid Dock.

> I used to do some hack that made the Dock invisible because I found it to be intrusive and useless.

Is there any reason you don't just hide it and never use it?

Hiding it means it comes back if the mouse wanders to the "wrong" area of the screen. That's as good as it gets now.

i remember when microsoft got rid of the start menu because you can just search for whatever you want anyways, and that is exactly what i do in osx too. Of course the start menu came back, but whether it is OSX or windows, all i do is a keyboard shortcut to bring up search to look for the app i want. So what I am left with is that as mad as me and everyone was that the start menu was going away microsoft was right.

I assumed the Mac OS X Dock was just an evolution of the NeXTSTEP Dock?

! MacDock creator here.

I didn’t know this! I’ll read up on that as the name is familiar but I have never used it!

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