A way to make OS X like OS 9?

June 18, 2006 11:29 AM

Is there a way to make the entirety of the graphical interface of OS X not only look but behave (as much as reasonably possible) like OS 9? (Again: I am not solely interested in the appearance of the window max/min/close widgets.)
posted by Mr. Six to computers & internet (10 comments total)

Run an OS 9 capable Mac emulator in full screen mode? What are you trying to achieve? Are you just really missing certain things from OS 9?
posted by public at 11:39 AM on June 18, 2006

I'm not interested in running OS 9 within OS X. I am interested in having appearance and usability elements of the OS 9 interface within OS X. The purpose is to avoid as much end user "retraining" in the interface as possible, while making the underlying system and range of applications available to the end user. Thanks.
posted by Mr. Six at 11:44 AM on June 18, 2006

I use X-Assist to put an application menu back in the to right corner. Evern since spotlight was introduced the menu moves around to the left or right of the click and other icons. It's random, and I just keep logging in and out until ti gets to the spot I want. There is no way to move it to the right of the spotlight menu.

I pin the dock to the lower right corner so that the trash can is generally in the right place. The dock is set up to be hidden though, and I rarely use it.

I use Graphite in the appeareacne to get rid of the colored window widgets. I used to use a theme manager, but I've since dropped that.

Those are all the tricks I use. Not sure what else you're trying to accomplish, but somebody somewhere has probably coded up a hack for it.
posted by willnot at 11:44 AM on June 18, 2006

Article on doing this:

Remove dock and more

Seperate article, same author
posted by filmgeek at 11:50 AM on June 18, 2006

I would say you can't get very close. Probably not close enough to make you happy. Unsanity does offer several haxies that reproduce some of the handy features of OS 9, such as windowshades and the customizable Apple menu. You could kill or minimize & hide the dock, and I believe there's an app-switcher menu haxie out there.

I know of no OS X themes that approximate OS 9, though I suppose one would be possible.

But still, you're trying to put new wine in old bottles. There's a lot about OS X that is conceptually different, and there's no good way to map it to the old interface. Trying to make the Finder behave like the old one would basically require writing the Finder all over again.
posted by adamrice at 11:55 AM on June 18, 2006

As a former computer graphics teacher I understand your desire to reduce the training time. But, the hoops you would have to go through, even if it's possible, do not IMHO justify the time. It's like trying to stop time, as a matter of fact.

It's just a fact of life these days that things change very quickly in the tech world. I think you'd be doing your end users a disservice not to move them forward by showing them the advantages of an operating system that is far superior to OS 9. .
posted by Taken Outtacontext at 2:02 PM on June 18, 2006

X-Assist restores much of the application switching behavior of OS 9, and it appears to be very stable (it's in my Login Items, so I have it running all the time, and I've never had any problems with it).
posted by klausness at 3:32 PM on June 18, 2006

I think that Gershwix is the theme that comes closest to the OS9 look. Not that that helps you in the functionality department. Fruitmenu is supposed to give you back the apple menu, although it looks like they've added some features.
posted by gamera at 3:51 PM on June 18, 2006

You want DragThing, ClassicMenu, WindowShade, Focus (a program that provides an icon showing which application is active), and ShapeShifter running Gershwin X for a theme, as well as two hacks: one that will speed up all the annoying fancy window animations to the point of invisibility, and another which will remap apple-N to creating a new folder instead of a new window.

That's what my machine runs and I'm quite happy with it. The dock is an excellent running applications menu, so don't kill it completely.
posted by macinchik at 9:55 PM on June 18, 2006

Sorry I am coming late to this, but you really only need to understand the one basic difference between OS x and OS9. The User Home. It took me ages to conceptualize where things were on my Mac after switching to X. Once I grasped this basic concept the other things within the X interface really didn't matter to me or to the 154 people I trained to make the switch. People really like some of the docks features. They REALLY like the ability to drag folders to the sidebar and Dock. They also like the seeming ease when creating aliases to servers. Although this is a 'feature' that was underused by us in OS9, I implemented it through training in X
posted by Gungho at 4:22 AM on June 19, 2006