![]() This decision was confirmed in 2019, with its website updated to say:ĭragThing is written using the 32-bit Carbon APIs that Apple have now removed in macOS 10.15 Catalina. In late 2018, the software developer warned of probable end-of-life. No, I would have ended up with DragThing." It was praised in a 2004 article by Bruce Tognazzini, who said ".if I could have taken all the lessons learned in Systems 1 through 9 and applied them to System X, I certainly wouldn't have ended up with the Dock. ĭragThing was first released on and celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2005. None of Thomson's code survives in the current shipping version of Apple's Dock. Thomson left Apple shortly after Mac OS X was released and resumed work on DragThing, releasing version 4.0 on 24 March 2001, skipping version 3. He surmised that the built-in Dock of OS X would soon make DragThing obsolete. as part of the team working on Mac OS X's Finder and Dock. The DragThing release schedule slowed between 19, as its developer James Thomson was then employed at Apple Inc. These features were not implemented by Apple until Mac OS 8.5.ĭragThing was one of the first applications to adopt the Platinum appearance on Mac OS 8 and ran in the Blue Box on Apple's aborted Rhapsody project. In its early versions, DragThing brought many features useful in a multitasking environment to Classic Mac OS such as alt-tab application switching and an onscreen representation of running processes. Dock contents could be organized into tabs and paying the shareware fee enabled the user to assign a keyboard shortcut to any dock item.ĭragThing won many awards, and in 2010 MacWorld gave it 4.5 mice, highlighting its utility for users who preferred using the mouse over keyboard-oriented launchers such as LaunchBar or QuickSilver. Intended for organization and as an application switcher, DragThing allowed for multiple docks with user-specified settings such as color, texture and shape. Now, if I can only find a copy of that old QuickClips CD-ROM that used to come with the QuickTime Starter Kit, and the nostalgia will be complete.DragThing was a shareware Dock application for Mac OS X. It even out lasted the infamous “Missile Command” clone that worked from the 128k Macs to early OS X, while Carbon was still targetable. Even thought the current app has little to no relationship to its original incarnation, at least from a UI standpoint, it gives me a good nostalgic feeling that this app survived the turbulent technology changes over the decades Apple product users have been exposed to. That app never made it to Intel.)īut PCalc was the first app I paid for when the iOS app store opened, and I’ve happily used it on my iPod touch and iPads ever since, even adding a tip to the jar when it was first added. (For the record, I switched to an obscure app called MathPad. It was initially paid for by Apple via pack-in with some models, with one upgrade fee out of appreciation. I no longer use PCalc on my Mac, as my last license for it was from the Classic OS era. So it seems entirely feasible that PCalc will make it to 30, as I hopefully make it to (almost) 50.Īnd yes, I will port it to the AR glasses and the car. It doesn’t seem all that long to me since the 20th anniversary. If you want to read up the origin story in detail, you can do so here. Thanks to everybody who has bought a copy over the years and made that possible, or put something into the tip jar. ![]() In a way, it’s the surprisingly devoted child that’s supporting me in my old age. I wrote one of the most excessive About screens in recorded history.īut I keep coming back to PCalc. I went to work for Apple on the Finder and Dock. I wrote DragThing, which was the go to app launcher on the Mac for a good decade. I haven’t been writing PCalc constantly for 25 years. Some of that code still runs today, deep at the heart of the machine.ĭon’t get me wrong. I started writing in the summer of 1992 and it took me around six months to get it into a state where I was happy to show it to the world. I sent an email to the Info-Mac archive moderators that evening, and it turned up on FTP mirror sites around the world a few days later. PCalc is a neat simulation of a programmable scientific calculator. ![]() Yet, that is how long it has been since PCalc 1.0 was released.Įnclosed is a binhex file containing a submission for your archives. A quarter of a century sounds even longer.
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