The repercussions of Apple's "lean years" continue to ripple forth from the past to bum us out in the present. When we think back to May of last year, or whenever it was that Apple announced that huge round of cuts, probably the project we mourned for most of all was OpenDoc. At the time, we had only recently discovered just how cool that component-based, document-centric way of computing really was. But it was way too far ahead of its time, and in general people weren't ready to let go of the traditional "applications and documents" way of thinking. And so not many developers embraced OpenDoc, and those that did found that not many people were buying their products. As sad as it was, we later agreed that it was in Apple's best interests-- and therefore in the best interests of the continuation of the Macintosh platform-- that OpenDoc be "Steved."

However, the people who were using OpenDoc were mostly using it with a free Apple product called Cyberdog. Cyberdog was a collection of OpenDoc parts that allowed the basic integration of Internet objects right into one's documents; you could, for instance, throw a live web page of your company's current stock price into the middle of your quarterly report, or embed a live ftp connection right next to it to allow the dragging of remote files to your local hard disk. It's the kind of thing that's sort of hard to explain-- which is one reason that OpenDoc failed-- but once you try it, it really opens your eyes to the possibilities. Cyberdog, however, was originally intended to be an OpenDoc demo, not a full-featured suite of Internet software; third parties were expected to write replacement parts for Cyberdog. For instance, early on, Netscape had committed to releasing an OpenDoc version of its Navigator web browser that would replace Cyberdog's relatively anemic browser component. This, of course, never came to pass, but Apple did a respectable job of pumping up Cyberdog's features itself, and to this day it actually remains a very capable-- and fun-- suite of Internet software.

Unfortunately, it appears that Cyberdog's days are numbered. According to MacCentral, Apple has officially pulled the plug on the Cyberdog web site, and the software is conspicuously absent from the Mac OS 8.5 CD-ROM. Unfortunately, as with Newton, Apple seems strangely reluctant to release or sell the technology to a third party to continue its development, but there is a petition available if you'd like to see Cyberdog kept alive and thriving by a willing company named Kantara. Sybie, we hardly knew ye...