I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 18. Here are my solutions to them.

1: AppleWorks/ClarisWorks
First I was one (AppleWorks), then another (ClarisWorks). No one’s in any doubt that I was industrious (works), as there wasn’t much that I couldn’t do (an office suite) until I died 15 years ago (last version January 2004). What was I?

2: Rhapsody
I was to have followed a large instrumental work (Sonata, a musical term for a substantial instrumental work, which was the name for Mac OS 9, its predecessor), but only made it to a few servers (Mac OS X Server versions 1.0-1.2) before being replaced by a darling of Wall Street (Mac OS X, based more on NeXTSTEP, which was popular with large financial institutions). What was I?

3: What thinks that 6,671,489 is more normal than 50,089, and 4,312,202 is more normal than 50,053, but is perfectly content with 50,079? Answer: Unicode Form D normalisation (or HFS+ name encoding, which uses that normalisation scheme).
What thinks that 6,671,489 is more normal than 50,089, and 4,312,202 is more normal than 50,053, but is perfectly content with 50,079?
6,671,489 is hex 65CC81, which is the UTF-8 encoding of the Form D normalisation of the character é, which is C3A9 in UTF-8; similarly for the second example and the UTF-8 character Å. However, 50,079 or UTF-8 C39F is the German ß, which doesn’t normalise and remains unchanged. As Form D normalisation is standard in Mac HFS+ name encoding, you can equally well give that as the solution.

I look forward to your putting alternative cases.