How Mac applications evolved from a multitude of resources to a bundle formed from a standard layout of directories, and how they have come to be largely self-contained in macOS 26.
Classic Mac
Adobe’s Carousel reader came in 1993, and in Mac OS X PDF was built into its Quartz graphics. That enabled Preview to become the claimed ‘fastest PDF viewer on the planet’.
Four eras: rebuilding the Desktop, repairing permissions, resetting Home permissions, and most recently cursing privacy protection. A cynical history?
From AppleSearch and Find File in 1994, demand for search has grown with rising storage capacity. Sherlock was released in 1998, then replaced by Spotlight in 2005. Twenty years later it’s still going strong.
How Apple adopted a triplet version numbering scheme by 1988, then complicated it with additional revision numbers, Supplemental Updates, RSRs, and more.
Originally alert boxes, these have brought us information, warnings and errors in different formats. Although they should be rare, macOS has used them increasingly, sometimes uninformatively.
From initial FONT bitmaps, PostScript Type 1 in the LaserWriter, and the release of TrueType in 1991, to data-fork format TrueType suitcases and OpenType in Mac OS X.
From early code pages based on language-specific variants of Extended ASCII, through 2-byte support in WorldScript II, to Unicode and the annual emoji update.
From their use to replicate floppy disks in manufacture, to their key roles in macOS, for distribution of software, and on network servers to contain backups. Unglamorous but essential.
The magic of Mac was how you could double-click a document and it opened in the right app. Now that works differently with LaunchServices, it offers me 70 apps to edit any text document. Can we return to magic please?
The Eclectic Light Company 