Ramblings of a Classic Refugee or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love OS X

Some of you may remember me laying into OS X (or rather the Auqua interface) a while back. I had a bit of a play with it, but I really missed a lot of the UI features of Classic and also felt that Aqua was a bit twee-looking.

I did spend about half a day in OS X but, as those amongst you who know me can testify, I'm a timid little creature who doesn't like change very much. So, for a while I just booted back into Classic and stayed immersed in all those handy familiar MacOS 9 features I had come to know and love.

However, I wanted to be able to use OS X for its stability and its rather groovy new abilities like Samba, proper Perl, Apache, etc. After all, in the half day I'd used OS X, having those built into my Mac proved to be a great usability advantage. I wanted to have thaose advantages without giving up the advantages conferred by the usability of MacOS Classic.

So I sat down and thought about the things I liked about OS 9- and all the things I didn't like about OS X. After all, I'm quite a late adopter and there must be a million and one GUI hacks out there by now. It turns out that I was able to get almost everything I wanted to give OS X a classic feel (if not look).

Now, I expect that many of you OS X Old Hands (Mison, Cantrell, Bueller?) will probably find this to be old news, but nontheless, here's my guide to making OS X usable again for old fans of MacOS Classic who haven't yet taken the plunge.

I figured that the first things to attempt would be to make OS X's interface less offensive through the use of the built-in prefs before I got going installing any hacks.

1) Reduce the default icon size to less than the size of a dinner plate. I have to deal with lots of files, thank you, so I want all the real-estate I can get. Plus, I don't feel like a small child recovering from surgery, Apple, so don't treat me like one.

2) Sort out the Dock:

1. reduce the size
2. turn off the cycle-sapping magnification. Now I can listen to MP3s without skipping whenever my mouse strays over the Dock.
3. anchor it to the right of the screen. This is good - that's where I used to keep the tear-off application switching menu fort' drag files onto. Excellent, I've already duplicated one of the features I missed from MacOS 9 by simple preference tweaking! Yay!

Speaking of the tear-off apps menu, I also missed having the application switcher in the top right of the screen. There is a hack for this, it seems, so I thought I'd give it a pop:
http://homepage.mac.com/vercruesse/cocoa/asm/

Okay, so you can't tear it off like the old apps menu, but I'm approximating that functionality with the Dock.

http://www.snurfer.org/OSX/Grab1.jpg

Another thing I thought was missing was the familiar trashcan in the bottom-right of the screen:
http://homepage.mac.com/northernSW/trashx.html

I like the suggestion on the webpage that you put it in your finder windows toolbar so that you can get to the trash when it and/or the Dock are not visible for whatever reason. It can also delete files securely and thoroughly ... niiiiice.

I've seen a lot of complaints from people who find the alt-tabbing on OS X to be pants because it cycles in Dock order and not last-used. Yeah, I miss LiteSwitch, too. This seems to be a good drop-in replacement for LiteSwitch (and then some), plus it has an amusingly cheesy illustration on the website:
http://www.keyboardmaestro.com/

http://www.snurfer.org/OSX/Grab3.jpg

But the thing that I missed most of all about MacOS 9 was the apple menu, especially after Blech introduced me to Amico. I used to keep all my stuff in that menu, all nicely organised with dividers and everything. I don't be tickling or nothing. And it was easily reachable (it would have been even more easily reachable if Apple had thought about Fitt's law and actually put the fscking trigger in the corner rather than about 5 pixels away from it).

One of the first things I did when trying to find my way around OS X was to try the apple menu, only to find this neutered, practically useless selection of options. I was gutted. I figured I'd have to splurge my desktop with aliases (especially since we no longer have pop-up folders along the bottom of the screen). Dammit.

Luckily, someone sugested this to me:
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/system_disk_utilities/fruitmenu.html

Which does all of the stuff that Amico did, plus things like setting hotkeys for your apple menu items. Grrrrreat. Unfortunately, it nags worse than Our Cresley, but that's a price I'm willing to pay for getting my beloved apple menu back. Or I could just shell out the seven bucks. :)

http://www.snurfer.org/OSX/Grab2.jpg

So yeah, it may still look all candified still and I didn't get everything back, but I'm now enjoying most of what I consider to be important usability benefits of the OS 9 interface whilst not having to force-quit or reboot every hour. Uptime a week under OS X so far, no worries. It Feels Right. You *can* make OS X behave like OS 9 *in the good ways* if you try. I never boot into Classic any more and I'm in danger of becoming an OS X fanboy.

Stuff I didn't fix (any pointers welcome):

Windowshade. I *missed* that a lot. When I first double-clicked the top bar of a folder in OS X it immediately did that horrible genie animation and shoved itself in the Dock. Now, I was instinctively trying to windowshade because I felt that the screen was too cluttered and I wanted a way to see behind the folder without having to mouse all the way back to the dock to restore. Unfortunately Windowshade X disables itself an hour after login unless you send your USD7:
http://download.cnet.com/downloads/0-10238-108-89845.html?tag=upd

I'd pay to get the customisable apple menu back but not windowshading.

Pop-up folders. I *really* miss them, but I've been unable to find a way to duplicate their functionality.

Spring-loaded folders. They should never have got rid of these. I was gobsmacked that they did since they're so *useful*. Ah well, it's due in the next release, I hear.

If anyone out there knows a way to fix either of those, then I'd love to hear it.