Moof
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Forget the standard print dialog: ClarusX2014 is changing orientation one print dialog at a time
Recently, Apple marked a major Mac anniversary. Celebrate the next 30 years of Macintosh by ditching this guy and replace him with a classic Clarus in your print dialog. Roby Sherman's ClarusX2014 offers a full rewrite of ClarusX2005, escorting dogcattle into the age of Mavericks. It provides an AppleScript-based utility that updates your page setup and print dialog icons. You'll need administrator privileges to install any of the supplied custom icon sets shown at the top-right of this post. If you're of an artistic bent and want to make your own 32 x 32-pixel TIFFs, you can use the utility to completely customize your experience. Me? I went with the QuartzClarus set. Now I find a smile whenever I print. Moof! Hat tip Mike Shields
Appleworks dies. Long live iWork
ComputerWorld UK reports that AppleWorks has been retired by Apple after 23 years. AppleWorks, aka ClarisWorks né StyleWare provided a complete, low-cost office suite for Macintosh computers all the way into the PowerPC era. I wrote my dissertation in the program and until a couple of years ago I still used it to create our family holiday cards. I was surprised by the news as I had assumed the program had been put to rest years ago, buried along-side Hypercard. Instead, it took the release of Apple Numbers to finally kill the old workhorse. iWork '08 imports AppleWorks documents including spreadsheets, presentations and word processing files.
Blast from the Past: Clarus, the Dogcow
There are two kinds of people[1]. Say "moof" and some people will look at you a little funny. Others will laugh knowingly. The latter are acquainted with Clarus. She is the Apple dogcow. Developed as part of the Cairo icon font by Susan Kare, the dogcow eventually became the mascot of the Page Setup dialog box. Unclear as whether the picture was bovine or canine, the two taxonomies merged into the "dogcow", the creature who says "moof". You can download a copy of Technical Note TN 1031 here (PDF). It's one of the few dogcow-related tech notes that still exist on the Apple server. For whatever reason, many of the original dogcow documents have been removed from developer.apple.com--you get redirected to the main page. MacFreek.nl has archived the text from Technical Note TN 31, the quintessential dogcow technote. This document answers the questions: "What is a Dogcow?", "But What Does This Have to do With the Macintosh?", and "Okay, So How Do I Draw a Dogcow?" It also points out that there are no known "cliff-dwelling dogcows" left in the wild. In the end, Clarus the DogCow is a reminder that Apple was once smaller than it is now and that its employees actually had a sense of humor. You can find an excellent overview of the entire phenomenon at StoryBytes. [1] By definition, there are the kind of people who divide people into two kinds of people and there are the kind who do not.
Moof and other Mac Icon Shirts
Susan Kare designed the original icons for the Macintosh as well as some for many early popular software programs. She's responsible for both the Moof the Dogcow and the error bomb icons, for instance.And now she's opened up a Cafe Press shop to sell her famous icon designs on t-shirts. Yes, you can get Moof on a t-shirt. Or the error bomb, the watch, or the alert icon.This is definitely getting added to my wishlist. I really want a Dogcow shirt.
