MacDock is like the Dock in modern macOS. To use it, simply launch the program. MacDock will be visible at the bottom of your screen.
You will see your running applications on the list (limited to 7 applications).
Clicking on any of them switches you to the app.
I love little projects like these. Even today, they make using older systems just a little bit less alien.
*chuckle* I can appreciate the sentiment, but the dock isn’t what I’d be looking for to add to the Power Mac G4 I have running Mac OS 9.
Overall, I find OSX/macOS to be more alien… but then I stayed on Windows 98 several years into the Windows XP era, then jumped from Windows XP to Linux before Vista came out and I’m currently a KDE user with a fairly “Windows 9x plus the freeware I used in Windows 9x”-ish panel layout.
(Maybe, once I’ve had time to work through the classic Mac OS programming tutorial materials and catch up on my other projects, I’ll port my QuickTile utility if I can’t find something similar… QuickTile is a Linux knock-off of a piece of Freeware I used back then called WinSplit Revolution.)
Also, something you changed broke my “Now insert (and tap) your Security Key” logins. Now, Firefox pops up an “Allow this site to open the chrome-extension link with System Handler?” dialog and won’t blink the light on my U2F/WebAuthn/FIDO-only YubiKey thing.
Given how much more inconvenient TOTP is, I’m left trying to decide whether I’d be more averse to commenting on OSNews less or disabling 2FA for it.
PC user interfaces peaked 25 years ago. Give me a simple win98-ish classic desktop & quick search/launcher and a drop-down terminal – that’s it!
Basically what I have.
1. I use a classic taskbar widget for Plasma because, if I left-click on a launcher, I want it to unconditionally open a new window dammit, and I use an application menu widget, not an application launcher widget.
2. I used Mike Lin’s MCL back in Win 9x, then Launchy, and now I use KDE but, funny enough, I use gmrun for my launcher because it’s snappier than KRunner for an equivalent configuration and can’t forget to disable data sources it doesn’t have.
3. For a drop-down terminal, I’ve flip-flopped back and forth between Yakuake and urxvt with its “kuake” plugin over the years.
4. On Windows, I used WinSplit Revolution for keyboard-driven window tiling and now I use my own QuickTile tool. Not sure what I’ll wind up doing when Wayland becomes viable enough to kill off APIs insecure enough to allow arbitrary applications to do desktop-agnostic repositioning of arbitrary windows not their own.
You might like SerenityOS
https://serenityos.org/
Perfection.
I’m 99.9% sure there was a system extension that allowed you to fix the launcher position to the center of the screen (as opposed to being a tab on the left or right). I’m wracking my brain as to the name of the shareware that did it… Does anyone else remember it?
What “launcher” are you thinking of?
Classic didn’t have one. There were add-ons and alternatives, such as AtEase, but that was fullscreen so it can’t be what you’re thinking of.
Are you talking about the Control Strip? That wasn’t used for launching programs usually though.
After more stubborn googling than I’m proud of, I found what I was thinking of!
Seems the developer still has it available, which I think is really good of them!
https://dragthing.com/english/download.html
Fun! Just what I need for my Quadra! 🙂
Back in the early to mid 2000s, an IRIX user decided that SGIs needed a MacOS X style dock and created ‘iconbar’. https://iconbar.sourceforge.net/
What’s funny now is that as I revisit iconbar I see that the last commit to the CVS (!) repository is by the author and it’s a patch that I sent. In 2006. I remember running this on my Octane2 as it screamed in the corner and I though “hey, it kind of looks like a Mac, but in italics”.