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.