10 Things We Miss From OS 9
Posted 05/23/2008 at 2:47pm
| by Michael Simon
Come on Apple, bring this to OS X
Print Window
It’s not necessarily a daily task, but there are plenty of times when the ability to quickly print the contents of a Finder window comes in handy; however, Apple inexplicably removed this feature when making the move from Carbon to Cocoa. It has since included a hidden, cumbersome way to accomplish this simple task, but after six major versions of OS X, Print Window has yet to reappear. (Here’s how to do it: Open the desired Finder window; press Command+Shift+4, followed by the space bar; move the camera cursor that appears until it highlights the open Finder window; click the mouse once; double-click the document that appears on your desktop or in the Documents Stack to open it in Preview; and finally, press Command+P. Easy, right?)
Pre-Safari
Internet Explorer
OK, bear with me on this one. Back before I bought my first Mac, I did all my writing and researching on a used laptop running Windows 95. Once I scraped together enough money to foot the bill for a PowerMac, I ditched the ThinkPad and dove head first into the Mac desktop experience, which was a little daunting at first. It may sound strange, but it was comforting to see the blue Internet Explorer icon in a sea of unfamiliarity --- and I think today’s switchers would appreciate the same friendly face.
Uh oh
Bomb
When OS 9 crashed --- which was far more frequent than we’d like to remember --- a dialog box popped up informing you of the need to restart. To ease the pain of losing whatever you happened to be working on at the time was a silly graphic of a bomb seconds away from going off. Apple’s OS X answer is an unsettling full-screen picture of a power button, with a cascading multi-language message imploring a restart. We prefer OS 9’s cute, little exploder.
Moof!
Clarus the Dogcow
Like die-hard fans of any professional sports team, Mac devotees have a tendency to latch onto little things that set them apart from the rest of the crowd. Enter Clarus the dogcow. Introduced as one of the dingbats in the Cairo font suitcase way back when, Clarus soon found a home in the Mac OS page setup box, where she skillfully showed the paper’s orientation, “moofed” when clicked and inspired legions of geeks to print a little more often than necessary. She even had her own theme song, found in Macintosh Technical Note #31:
A dogcow is what I want to be.
Pictured in dialogs,
Running through the weeds,
In and out of advertisements,
Loving my naughty deeds.
Feeling in black and white.
Over the edge of cliffs,
Out with the tide in the sea.
Living life to the fullest,
Sweet survival in 2 D.
And if anyone at Apple is reading this, we all miss her dearly.

This may take a while
Coffee Breaks
With the dawn of OS X, proper multi-tasking on the Mac was finally born. No longer did we have to wait for a 1MB Photoshop file to render before we could begin working on another project. Gone were the trips outside for a cigarette while a video compressed, or to the vending machine while a disc burned. Of course, we appreciate the increase in productivity, but how are we supposed to catch a cat-nap while a progress bar slowly moves across the screen now?
Editors Note (AKA Robbie): Thanks to a few keen-eyed readers, we realized that a wonderful Stickies apps resides near the bottom of our Applications folder in Leopard. Let's just say we've written a few unprintable words on our newly discovered desktop Sticky. Still, we're not about to hide our mistake. Check out the Stickies item below.
All the convenience, none of the adhesive
Desktop Stickies
There’s no arguing that Dashboard is one of the most useful apps to come out of Cupertino’s labs since iTunes. With breathtaking effects, striking graphics and dozens of practical applications, Dashboard opened up the Mac desktop to a world of mini Web apps available at the stroke of a key. They’ve undoubtedly made our lives easier, but there is at least one that we OS 9 users would like to see return to OS X proper: Stickies. Dashboard Stickies are certainly useful, but Post-It notes work much better when they’re in plain view. UNIX tinkers can fiddle in Terminal to trick the Stickies Widget (defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode YES), but most Mac users will be forced to enter Dashboard to read their important notes.
What do you miss from OS 9? Tell us in the comments below.