Clarus: The Legend Lives On (3/27/01)
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Take off those black armbands and stop mourning, because Clarus lives! Through the latter stages of Mac OS X's long development, many of us grew concerned that the beloved dogcow, a denizen of the Macintosh operating system from the very beginning (first in the Cairo font, and then in the Page Setup dialog box), was destined to be excluded from our shiny new OS. Why would Apple callously evict such a long-lived and faithful mascot? Perhaps it's a sad result of Steve Jobs's anti-frivolity campaign, or maybe it's just that in an era of translucent colors and system-wide antialiasing, there's just no place for an anachronistic black and white bitmap (no matter how cuddly). Who knows? For whatever reason, though, Clarus was absent from the public beta, and despite the popularity of a certain "Save Our Dogcow" petition, we therefore feared for the worst.

But now that Mac OS X 10.0 is on the shelves, we're happy to report that Clarus is present-- albeit in severely downplayed form. Faithful viewer Matt Anderson pointed us towards a web page with evidence of the good news-- a screenshot revealing that Clarus is alive and well and living in a file called "localized.rsrc" buried so deep in the file system the full path would choke a rhino. Okay, so it isn't exactly a glory job, but we suppose a dogcow in the Dock is perhaps a little too much to hope for.

But fear not; out of sight doesn't necessarily mean out of mind. Faithful viewer Eric Worman reports that he's found a repeatable way to evoke Clarus's distinctive "Moof!" even though she's been stationed all the way at the bottom of the Carbon framework. When running a Classic application (he got it to work in both Illustrator 9 and Photoshop 6), he opened a file from a mounted AppleShare server, triggered another Open dialog by using the "Place" command, clicked on the pull-down menu to reveal his file path, and discovered (much to his delight) that his server's name was then showing up as "Moof"; he has kindly provided a screenshot for your edification. It just goes to show you, you can't keep a good dogcow down.


 
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The above scene was taken from the 3/27/01 episode:

March 27, 2001: Is Apple planning to offer free Mac use and Internet access to anyone willing to venture into its upcoming retail store locations? Meanwhile, word has it that Apple's internal Mac OS 9 vs. Mac OS X rivalry is moot now that the two teams have merged, and Clarus the dogcow does appear in Mac OS X, though in a drastically less visible role...

Other scenes from that episode:

  • 2949: But Will There Be Biscotti? (3/27/01)   Hallelujah, the post-Expo rumors drought finally appears to be over! We never thought we'd see the day, but we're looking at a hat trick, here: the Big Three of the online Mac rumor mill all posted updates on Monday...

  • 2950: Peace, Unity, & Group Hugs (3/27/01)   So we can't say for sure exactly what changes the Naked Mole Rat has made to his daily pharmaceutical intake over the course of this past month (less cough syrup, more benzene?), but whatever he's doing differently, it's working for him...

Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast...

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