I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 280. Here are my solutions to them.

1: Third prime should run at twice three or four, and four times two.

2: The third of XV brought AI for some.

3: If E > P and E + P = GPU what does E equal?

The common factor

I look forward to your putting alternative cases.

Here are this weekend’s Mac riddles to entertain you through family time, shopping and recreation.

1: Third prime should run at twice three or four, and four times two.

2: The third of XV brought AI for some.

3: If E > P and E + P = GPU what does E equal?

To help you cross-check your solutions, or confuse you further, there’s a common factor between them.

I’ll post my solutions first thing on Monday morning.

Please don’t post your solutions as comments here: it spoils it for others.

One of the novel features in the original Finder in Classic Mac OS was the use of distinctive icons for different types of document in an extensible scheme.

Every file had its type and creator codes, each consisting of four single-byte characters. The Desktop databases contained indexes to those, to enable the Finder to display the appropriate icon for a text document of type TEXT created by an app with the creator code of ttxt, SimpleText, for instance.

Apps provided a custom icon in their Resource fork for each type of document they supported. Periodically, those Desktop databases became broken, and documents lost their custom icons. The solution was to rebuild those Desktop databases from the data in each app’s Resources, a procedure that every Mac user became only too familiar with.

At some stage, perhaps in System 6 of 1988, or System 7 of 1991, document icons such as images could be displayed as miniatures or thumbnails instead. This was accomplished by apps creating that file’s thumbnail and saving it as an ICN# resource in the file’s Resource fork. Amazingly, this still works in Sequoia, where I pasted a prepared Resource fork into a Zip file to give it an inappropriate thumbnail.

The raw Resource fork is shown below in xattred as a com.apple.ResourceFork extended attribute.

Initially, Mac OS X continued a similar system, including custom thumbnails, until Apple introduced Quick Look in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, in 2007. This came with built-in support for a wide range of common document types, extending to QuickTime media including audio and video. One curious omission at first was that animated GIFs weren’t supported as animations until OS X 10.7.

Display of Thumbnails used the QuickLook framework documented here. This enabled third-parties to extend coverage to their own document types using QuickLook generators with the extension .qlgenerator. Initially, they were installed into /Library/QuickLook from each app bundle.

Normally, when QuickLook generated a Thumbnail or Preview, that was stored in its cache database kept in NSTemporaryDirectory in the path C/com.apple.QuickLook.thumbnailcache/. Those could give revealing insights into images and other documents accessed recently, and Wojciech Regula and Patrick Wardle discovered that, in High Sierra and earlier, it was easy for malicious software to examine that cache. Apple addressed that in macOS 10.14 Mojave by making the cache completely inaccessible.

In-memory caching of Thumbnails has also proved controversial in more recent versions of macOS. To deliver smooth scrolling of Thumbnails in the Finder’s Gallery views in particular, the Finder has taken to caching them in memory for up to two days, sometimes using several GB in the process. That can readily be mistaken for a memory leak, until those cached Thumbnails are finally flushed.

I described how QuickLook Thumbnails worked in early 2019, in the days before the SSV.

When you select a document in the Finder, a dialog, or somewhere else where you expect its icon to be shown, the Finder passes details of the document path and its type (UTI) to IconServices, to fetch the appropriate icon. This calls on its main service, iconservicesd in /System/Library/CoreServices, to check its icon cache.

Although the main icon store is locked away in /Library/Caches/com.apple.iconservices.store, there’s additional data in a folder on a path based on /private/var/folders/…/C/com.apple.iconservices, where … is an unreadable alphanumeric name. For icons used in the Dock, their cache is at /private/var/folders/…/C/com.apple.dock.iconcache. If the icon should be replaced by a QuickLook Thumbnail, such as in a Finder column view, QuickLook is asked to provide that thumbnail. That in turn may be cached in its protected cache at /private/var/folders/…/C/com.apple.QuickLook.thumbnailcache.

QuickLook then relies on there being an appropriate qlgenerator to create a thumbnail of that document type; if the qlgenerator is flawed or can’t cope with the document’s contents, that could easily fall over. For example, if you renamed a text file with a .jpeg extension so that macOS considered it was a JPEG image, the bundled qlgenerator might have simply resulted in the display of a busy spinner, rather than resolving to a generic JPEG document icon. IconServices should then deliver the appropriate icon back to the Finder to display it.

In macOS 10.15 Catalina (2019), Apple started replacing this system with a new framework named QuickLook Thumbnailing, documented here. That replaces qlgenerators with QuickLook preview extensions, in particular Thumbnail Extensions, as explained to developers at WWDC in 2019.

macOS 15.0 Sequoia has finally removed support for qlgenerators. That has resulted in the unfortunate loss of custom Thumbnails and Previews for document types of third-party apps that are still reliant on qlgenerators, and haven’t yet got round to providing equivalent app extensions. It’s almost as if the Desktop databases need to be rebuilt again.

I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 279. Here are my solutions to them.

1: The first year it goes from London to Leeds with the First Eleven on its arm.

2: When intel brought the fifth big cat in a solo or duo.

3: When 6100-8100 came from the aim of seven.

The common factor

I look forward to your putting alternative cases.

Here are this weekend’s Mac riddles to entertain you through family time, shopping and recreation.

1: The first year it goes from London to Leeds with the First Eleven on its arm.

2: When intel brought the fifth big cat in a solo or duo.

3: When 6100-8100 came from the aim of seven.

To help you cross-check your solutions, or confuse you further, there’s a common factor between them.

I’ll post my solutions first thing on Monday morning.

Please don’t post your solutions as comments here: it spoils it for others.

Firmware, software that’s intimately involved with hardware at a low level, has changed radically with each of the different processor architectures used in Macs.

Classic Macs based on Motorola 68K processors come with their own Macintosh ROM. That changed after the first PowerPC models of 1994, and the Power Macintosh 9500 from 1995 supports Apple’s version of Open Firmware. That had originated as OpenBoot in Sun Microsystems’ SPARC-based computers, and is based on the language Forth. Macs with Open Firmware can be booted into an interactive interface that makes it relatively straightforward to support and bring up new hardware. It’s also a security nightmare.

Firmware version numbering was elaborate, with a ROM revision, here $77D.45F6, a Boot ROM version of $0004.25f1, and a Mac OS ROM file version of 8.4, for this Power Mac G4 running Mac OS 9.2.1 in 2002. Apple supplied separate Mac OS ROM file updates as needed.

EFI

In 1998, Intel started work on the original Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) as its intended replacement for the BIOS in PCs. By the time Apple was beginning its transition from PowerPCs in 2006, EFI was changing into Unified EFI (UEFI), and has since progressed as far as version 2.10 in 2022.

Once an Intel Mac has cleared its initial self-test routines (POST), and key custom chips like the SMC are running, EFI firmware is loaded next. The purpose of the EFI phase and the boot loader boot.efi is to augment the basic facilities provided by BootROM to the point where the macOS kernel can be loaded with its extensions. Key to this is providing access to the Mac’s hardware through the device tree, IODeviceTree, listing and relating all the devices in that Mac. This is built by boot.efi and passed to the kernel when it loads, and forms the basis for IOKit within macOS.

Model-specific boot.efi software also provides ongoing and additional support for boot services, including memory management, basic functions for timers and events, and for hardware access. It supports basic console protocols for input and output, and access to storage systems. Runtime services extend these to give access to variables stored in the NVRAM, and to GUIDs/UUIDs used for key variables in the EFI phase and later. Most importantly, boot.efi looks for startup key commands, originally named snag keys by Apple, such as Command-R to run in Recovery mode, Command-S and -V for Single User and Verbose modes, and Shift for Safe mode.

When Apple introduced Boot Camp in 2006, it made changes to boot.efi to support booting from operating systems other than macOS. This essentially provides a suite of drivers supporting Mac hardware in terms of a Windows hardware platform, engaged when the Mac is to be booted in that operating system rather than macOS.

Firmware security

In March 2015, two security researchers from LegbaCore, Xeno Kovah and Corey Kallenberg, demonstrated proof-of-concept attacks on the BIOS of several computers including Dell, HP, and other PCs that could have been used to implant malicious code. Later that year, Kovah and Trammell Hudson turned their attention to Macs, demonstrating a firmware worm named Thunderstrike 2.

For the first nine years of Intel Macs, Apple had provided EFI firmware updates separately from updates to OS X. That year, Apple changed the way that it supplied firmware, delivering it only as part of system upgrades and updates. Although older separate firmware updates are still available, those were the last.

Then in 2017, Rich Smith and Pepijn Bruienne of Duo Labs discovered that many Macs were running outdated firmware. Their concern was less about potential bugs and other problems, and more about the security risk posed. Apple had already been busy, hiring Xeno Kovah and Corey Kallenberg who started work there in November 2015, and Nikolaj Schlej, another firmware security researcher, who joined them the following August. They developed a new tool eficheck, released in High Sierra on 25 September 2017. Each week until it was dropped from Sonoma, eficheck checked current firmware against a local database of versions known to be ‘good’, and with the user’s permission sent a report to Apple in the event that it found discrepancies.

Back in late 2017, this iMac17,1 was reported as running Boot ROM version IM171.0105.B26.

T2 firmware

In 2016, the year before Smith and Bruienne’s report, Apple introduced first the T1 chip, then hot on its heels the T2 the following year. With two separate CPUs in each T2 Mac, there are two separate sets of firmware, one EFI and the other known as iBridge or BridgeOS. Following the established pattern, both are only updated by macOS installers and updaters.

After standard power-on self-test and SMC initialisation, the T2 sub-system establishes the level of Secure Boot in force, and, if that’s Full or Medium Security, boot.efi is checked before being loaded, providing security throughout the boot process.

Apple silicon Macs

The introduction of Macs using the M1 family of chips in 2020 brought complete change in firmware to support Secure Boot, and moves away from UEFI completely. The aim of boot security in Apple silicon Macs is to provide a verified chain of trust through each step in the boot process to the loading of macOS, that can’t be exploited by malicious components. This consists of four main stages:

• The Boot ROM in the hardware.
• The Low-Level Bootloader, LLB, or first stage.
• iBoot, or second stage.
• The macOS kernel, which loads all its required kernel extensions.

One of many changes made from UEFI is that startup key combinations have been replaced by the Power button to engage Recovery and other special startup modes, which has both improved security of Recovery mode and made its features more accessible. Instead of the user having to memorise a list of different key combinations required to access different features, all are now integrated within a single environment.

Apple silicon Macs are the first Macs whose firmware can be both upgraded and downgraded by restoring them from IPSW image files when the Mac has been put into DFU mode. For the time being, at least, all Apple silicon Macs run a unified firmware version tied not to the chip or model, but to the macOS version, and only delivered in IPSW files and macOS updates.

I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 278. Here are my solutions to them.

1: Platform executive arranges props and lighting for window groups.

2: Blank characters open in parks for multiple desktops.

3: Regulate operational flight to exposé them all.

The common factor

I look forward to your putting alternative cases.

Here are this weekend’s Mac riddles to entertain you through family time, shopping and recreation.

1: Platform executive arranges props and lighting for window groups.

2: Blank characters open in parks for multiple desktops.

3: Regulate operational flight to exposé them all.

To help you cross-check your solutions, or confuse you further, there’s a common factor between them.

I’ll post my solutions first thing on Monday morning.

Please don’t post your solutions as comments here: it spoils it for others.

I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 277. Here are my solutions to them.

1: Volatile anaesthetic to catch fish over coaxial cable.

2: Flight terminal for wireless in cards and base stations.

3: Neighbourhood chat between a twisted pair came with the LaserWriter.

The common factor

I look forward to your putting alternative cases.

Here are this weekend’s Mac riddles to entertain you through family time, shopping and recreation.

1: Volatile anaesthetic to catch fish over coaxial cable.

2: Flight terminal for wireless in cards and base stations.

3: Neighbourhood chat between a twisted pair came with the LaserWriter.

To help you cross-check your solutions, or confuse you further, there’s a common factor between them.

I’ll post my solutions first thing on Monday morning.

Please don’t post your solutions as comments here: it spoils it for others.

How many design and print shops started off with two Macs and a printer, and blossomed with the desktop publishing revolution of the 1980s? Yet when it was first launched, the Mac had poor printer support, and didn’t even have a parallel port, then the standard for office printers. In June 1984, Apple released the first printer designed for the Mac, the dot-matrix ImageWriter with a serial port. The following March came the LaserWriter, featuring PostScript and LocalTalk. The latter was a poor man’s Ethernet, running through an RS-422 port over cheap and simple LocalTalk cabling.

Printer support software was initially primitive, with a small desk accessory named Choose Printer to select which port and driver to use. In System 7 (1991), this became an app in its own right, the Chooser, to handle both printer and network connections.

Printer setup was handled through the Chooser too.

Printer configuration used PPD files for each model of supported printer.

The print dialog supported printing to file as well, although in those days that most commonly generated raw PostScript files rather than PDF.

By 2001 with Mac OS X, printing and networking had become so separated that the Chooser was replaced by the Print Centre, although OS X was still in need of a full print architecture. That arrived in 10.2 (2002) in CUPS (originally the Common Unix Printing System), which had been developed by Michael Sweet.

In Mac OS X 10.3 (2003), Print Centre was replaced by the Printer Setup Utility app, with a pane in System Prefs and later System Preferences. That was initially named Print & Fax, then Print & Scan in 10.7 (2011), and became Printers & Scanners from 10.9 (2013).

Printer Setup Utility became increasingly complex. Here it is in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger in 2006, when it supported a variety of printer connections, and drivers for each of the more popular models from many manufacturers.

CUPS is powerful and sophisticated, with its own repair feature.

In 2001, the Network pane was still used to configure AppleTalk, as supported by Apple’s own printers, the last of which had been discontinued in 1999.

In 2002, Printer Utility still showed its influence from the Chooser.

This is the Print dialog from 2001.

This is the Print & Fax pane from System Preferences in Snow Leopard, in 2010. Note that this includes a scanner, although the pane wasn’t renamed to Printers & Scanners until 10.9 (2013).

OS X incorporated its own printer drivers as well as those provided by printer manufacturers, a feature that was transformed when Apple introduced AirPrint (in conjunction with Hewlett-Packard) in late 2010, primarily to support printing from the iPad. Although AirPrint didn’t come to OS X until 2012, since then support has grown to become almost universal, over a period in which most printers have become less used, to the point where many now just sit gathering dust.

I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 276. Here are my solutions to them.

1: Armour, postal matter or electronic message delivered in 2001.

2: Originally Minotaur, from first release in 2004 it reads the news as well as the Andersons’ puppets.

3: Those attending the important came with a PIM in 2000, but was replaced by outlook 10 years later.

The common factor

I look forward to your putting alternative cases.

Here are this weekend’s Mac riddles to entertain you through family time, shopping and recreation.

1: Armour, postal matter or electronic message delivered in 2001.

2: Originally Minotaur, from first release in 2004 it reads the news as well as the Andersons’ puppets.

3: Those attending the important came with a PIM in 2000, but was replaced by outlook 10 years later.

To help you cross-check your solutions, or confuse you further, there’s a common factor between them.

I’ll post my solutions first thing on Monday morning.

Please don’t post your solutions as comments here: it spoils it for others.

I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 275. Here are my solutions to them.

1: Traced in epidemics and in emergencies, it replaced 2.

2: Formal speech and memory location publication until superseded by 1.

3. Packed lunch came in 2008 to integrate 2 with a table of dates.

The common factor

I look forward to your putting alternative cases.

Here are this weekend’s Mac riddles to entertain you through family time, shopping and recreation.

1: Traced in epidemics and in emergencies, it replaced 2.

2: Formal speech and memory location publication until superseded by 1.

3. Packed lunch came in 2008 to integrate 2 with a table of dates.

To help you cross-check your solutions, or confuse you further, there’s a common factor between them.

I’ll post my solutions first thing on Monday morning.

Please don’t post your solutions as comments here: it spoils it for others.

One of the most fundamental questions you can ask is what’s in my Mac, and what’s connected to it? From the size of its memory to the extensions it has loaded, we often need to know all about Mac internals. As Macs became more configurable and were offered with options, this became increasingly important.

From as early as System 4.1 in 1987, Macs could deliver more detailed information, that was gathered together in a new app, Apple System Profiler, in System 7.6 at the start of 1997. The following screenshots show Apple System Profiler at the height of its maturity, in System 9.0.4 during the Spring of 2000.

This Mac is a Power Mac G4 (AGP Graphics) model from 1999-2000, one of Apple’s distinctive ‘blue and white’ tower systems with a single-core PowerPC 7400 processor running at 450 MHz. It has 512 MB of memory and internal ATA hard disks. Notable by their absence from this overview are UUIDs, as they were seldom used at that time.

Two of its three internal expansion slots were occupied by a SCSI card, to connect to SCSI peripherals, and its display card driving the monitor.

With just two 12 Mb/s USB ports, one is wired to a USB hub, and has five peripherals connected to it, including a USB to serial adaptor.

Such information has also been critical for those developing software and hardware for the Mac, and in System 6.0.4 of 1989 Apple introduced a new dictionary of a Mac’s capabilities in its Gestalt system, whose name in English means an organised whole that’s perceived as more than the sum of its parts, an appropriate description of both a Mac and its OS.

In those days, Apple liked four-byte character codes, such as the Type and Creator codes used for all files in classic Mac OS, so each Gestalt was assigned a four-character identifier by Apple. When an app wanted to know which version of QuickTime was running, for example, all it had to do was call for the particular Gestalt value for that code.

Gestalt should have been a perfect solution, being concise, straightforward and accessible. But adoption was slow, and most important information was never added to its dictionary.

With the arrival of Mac OS X, Gestalt was carried over in its Carbon interfaces, but it slowly withered and died, being deprecated in 2012 when OS X 10.8 was released. You can find its remains still in Apple’s developer documentation.

In 2011, Mac OS X 10.7 replaced what had become shortened to System Profiler with the redesigned System Information, which has remained in macOS ever since.

For comparison, here’s an iMac Retina 27-inch in 2015, and a more modern USB hub supporting up to 480 Mb/s, in System Information.

Data gathered by System Information is also available to apps, although many developers prefer to delve into the mine of data in IOKit instead. There are times when I wonder what would have happened had Gestalt proved as successful as it deserved.

I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 274. Here are my solutions to them.

1: Exam success with a group of letters like open sesame.

2: 1 in 2007 and 16 this year like raid 1 for a new pairing.

3: Dumping grounds for gratuities and little hints.

The common factor

I look forward to your putting alternative cases.

Here are this weekend’s Mac riddles to entertain you through family time, shopping and recreation.

1: Exam success with a group of letters like open sesame.

2: 1 in 2007 and 16 this year like raid 1 for a new pairing.

3: Dumping grounds for gratuities and little hints.

To help you cross-check your solutions, or confuse you further, there’s a common factor between them.

I’ll post my solutions first thing on Monday morning.

Please don’t post your solutions as comments here: it spoils it for others.

The original Macintosh running Classic Mac OS was dependent on a great many components, but the most important of all was its graphics system QuickDraw. Without that, none of the windows, icons and images that were composed into its human interface would have happened. Although almost everything from QuickDraw has now been superseded and removed from modern macOS, you can still open most of its QuickDraw images saved in its custom format, PICT.

QuickDraw

QuickDraw was originally written by Andy Hertzfeld (b 1953) and Bill Atkinson (b 1951), who devised a remarkably innovative raster-based system, and implemented it to perform exceptionally well on the limited hardware available, starting with an 8 MHz 68000 CPU with only 128 KB of memory. It’s based around a logical drawing area called a GrafPort, which can be that within a window, the whole Desktop, or somewhere off-screen.

GrafPort coordinates set their origin at the top left and are signed 16-bit integers, giving a range of -32,767 to +32,767. Coordinates refer not to the pixels within the GrafPort, but to the infinitely thin lines between them. When drawing along a line between two coordinates, the thinnest line shown is a series of pixels below and to the right of the line. Pixels are square, and their default resolution conforms to the printing standard of 72 pixels/points per inch, just over 28 per centimetre. These were essential, to ensure that what you saw on the Mac’s display was what you got from the printer, WYSIWYG.

QuickDraw has commands to support a good range of graphics primitives, but Bill Atkinson’s stroke of genius was the data structure known as a Region, an arbitrary set of pixels that didn’t even have to be contiguous. Although initially constrained to 32 KB of memory, rising later to 64 KB, Regions can be combined with others, differenced, and manipulated in other ways. Their internal structure remains largely opaque, apart from the technical description used by Apple in its patent.

Picture and PICT

The other key data structure in QuickDraw is a Picture, the series of QuickDraw operations called to generate or manipulate images within a GrafPort. Those can be recorded, and played back later to repeat generation of that image, perhaps in a different GrafPort and coordinates. Rather than standardise on a raster graphics file format, QuickDraw saves Pictures in PICT files.

Initial releases of QuickDraw only supported black and white images, although limited colour support was added to work with Apple’s four-colour dot-matrix printer, the ImageWriter II of 1985. For the release of the Macintosh II in 1987, QuickDraw was extended to Color QuickDraw using CGrafPorts with 8-bit video cards. It was later enhanced to support 32 bits per pixel, in what is commonly known as 32-bit QuickDraw. The PICT file format had a similar journey. Originally, it only supported eight colours in PICT 1, then PICT 2 brought 24-bit colour and greyscale.

Examples

Here are some examples of QuickDraw graphics from Mac OS 9 in 2000, each converted from its original PICT screenshot taken 24 years ago.

This is Macromedia (also Aldus) FreeHand, then a competitor to Adobe Illustrator, before it was finally killed by Adobe in 2003.

This is Computer System Odessa’s ConceptDraw, then a new product, and still available for macOS.

This is Strata 3D, a high-end 3D modelling app first released for the Mac in 1988 and still available.

This is a typical role-playing game of the day.

This is X-Plane flight simulator by Austin Meyer of Laminar Research, first launched in 1995, and still going strong with support for Apple silicon Macs.

Quartz

Apple adopted a new graphics system for Mac OS X, although to begin with 32-bit Colour QuickDraw was retained in its Carbon API. Its replacement, Quartz, is built around PDF 1.4, but performed poorly until Quartz 2D Extreme in Mac OS X 10.4 (2005) offloaded its rendering to early GPUs. With that, QuickDraw was deprecated, and support successively removed, although there are still some graphics apps like GraphicConverter that can open and convert PICT files. Preview used to be able to as well, but that too seems to have been removed.

Documentation

You can still read Apple’s detailed guide to QuickDraw, Pictures and PICT files in Imaging with QuickDraw, which also gives you an idea of the depth and quality of Apple’s documentation in the past.

I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 273. Here are my solutions to them.

1: Resign, stop and almost quite is final.

2: Almost all round opens a window first.

3: Past preferences when celestial bodies sink below the horizon.

The common factor

I look forward to your putting alternative cases.

Here are this weekend’s Mac riddles to entertain you through family time, shopping and recreation.

1: Resign, stop and almost quite is final.

2: Almost all round opens a window first.

3: Past preferences when celestial bodies sink below the horizon.

To help you cross-check your solutions, or confuse you further, there’s a common factor between them.

I’ll post my solutions first thing on Monday morning.

Please don’t post your solutions as comments here: it spoils it for others.

We all know about the Desktop Publishing revolution that the first Macs and their PostScript LaserWriter printers brought in the late 1980s, but many have now forgotten the Desktop Video revolution that followed in the next decade. At its heart was support for multimedia in Apple’s QuickTime.

QuickTime isn’t a single piece of software, or even an API in Classic Mac OS, but a whole architecture to support almost any media format you could conceive of. It defines container and file formats for multiple media types, forming the basis for the MPEG-4 standard, extensible encoding and decoding of a wide variety of media using Codecs, and more.

QuickTime development was initially led by Apple’s Bruce Leak, who first demonstrated it at the Worldwide Developers Conference in May 1991 before its release as a separate set of components for System 6 and 7 in December that year. Initially it came with just three Codecs, supporting animated cartoons, regular video and 8-bit still images. Cinepak video and text tracks were added in QuickTime 1.5 the following year, when high-end Macs were capable of playing 320 x 240 video at 30 frames/s, which was groundbreaking at the time.

By the mid-1990s QuickTime was starting to flourish. Hardware support included Apple’s new PowerPC Macs in 1994, and MIDI devices, PCs running Windows, MIPS and SGI workstations. QuickTime VR (for Virtual Reality) allowed the user to navigate the virtual space within panoramic images. QuickTime media were being licensed and distributed on CD-ROMs, innovative games such as Myst depended on it, and the QuickTime project brought in revenue to Apple at a time that it was most needed.

That period also brought conflict. Apple had contracted San Francisco Canyon Company to port QuickTime to Windows, but Intel also hired them to develop a competing product, Video for Windows. Source code developed for Apple ended up in Intel’s product, resulting in a lawsuit in 1994, finally settled three years later.

QuickTime was enhanced through the late 1990s, with version 5 the first to support Mac OS X, and just over a year later, in 2002, that was replaced by version 6. The following year, QuickTime 6.2 only supported Mac OS X, with a slightly older version for Windows.

QuickTime was one of the more used parts of what was then named System Prefs, here seen setting the MIME types to be handled by the QuickTime Plug-in, in 2002.

For most Mac users, bundled QuickTime Player was the standard way to play most types of video, as seen here in 2002.

Apple built apps like iMovie on the strengths of QuickTime. First released in 1999, iMovie is seen here in 2002.

QuickTime version 7 was both the first and last to use the QuickTime Kit (QTKit) Framework in Cocoa.

Apple’s flagship movie editing suite Final Cut Pro started as KeyGrip by Macromedia, but was first released by Apple in 1999; this ‘HD’ was actually version 4.5 in 2004.

Streaming movies in those days (here 2005) had to cope with a range of relatively low transfer rates, down to 56 Kb/s over a fast dial-up connection with a modem.

Users had to pay a small fee to upgrade QuickTime Player to the Pro version, unlocking more features including extensive transcoding options, here in 2007.

Mac OS X Server included a QuickTime Streaming Server, and a separate app, QuickTime Broadcaster (seen here in 2007), could be used to deliver real-time audio and video over a network.

QuickTime X for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard in 2009 marked the start of its slow decline, with the removal of support for some media formats, most noticeably MIDI. Internally, it had been converted to a Cocoa framework, AVFoundation, with modern 64-bit audio and video Codecs. This anticipated discontinuation of all support for 32-bit code in macOS Catalina. The impact on Codecs that were never ported to 64-bit is still felt today. While QuickTime is still alive in the AVFoundation framework, it’s very different now from its heyday in the opening years of this century.

By 2011, QuickTime Player was a shadow of its former self, and a far cry from its earlier Pro version.

Its pane in System Preferences, here in Panther of 2015, didn’t reflect the inner changes.

This is iMovie in 2011.

Further reading

Wikipedia, good on version details
AppleInsider, long and detailed account by Prince McLean in 2007
Computer History Museum, good background from Hansen Hsu, with a link to YouTube video from three of the creators of QuickTime.

I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 272. Here are my solutions to them.

1: Used by courting birds with a haven for video and audio to replace the others.

2: 506 Romans can handle analogue and digital to display.

3: With CTA-861, 19 pins and five connectors, it’ll carry all your media, even HDCP.

The common factor

I look forward to your putting alternative cases.

Here are this weekend’s Mac riddles to entertain you through family time, shopping and recreation.

1: Used by courting birds with a haven for video and audio to replace the others.

2: 506 Romans can handle analogue and digital to display.

3: With CTA-861, 19 pins and five connectors, it’ll carry all your media, even HDCP.

To help you cross-check your solutions, or confuse you further, there’s a common factor between them.

I’ll post my solutions first thing on Monday morning.

Please don’t post your solutions as comments here: it spoils it for others.

I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 271. Here are my solutions to them.

1: Table of chapters as the top-level directory.

2: Real estate inventory, personal possessions or XML.

3: Reserves that could be human, such as strings and images.

The common factor

I look forward to your putting alternative cases.

Here are this weekend’s Mac riddles to entertain you through family time, shopping and recreation.

1: Table of chapters as the top-level directory.

2: Real estate inventory, personal possessions or XML.

3: Reserves that could be human, such as strings and images.

To help you cross-check your solutions, or confuse you further, there’s a common factor between them.

I’ll post my solutions first thing on Monday morning.

Please don’t post your solutions as comments here: it spoils it for others.

There aren’t many mythical animals in operating systems, and the most famous of those is probably Tux the penguin who appeared in Linux around 1996. The Mac’s first mythical animal predates that by more than a decade, and is the distinctive dogcow named Clarus, who appeared in every version of Mac OS until Mac OS X.

When Annette Wagner was designing the Page Setup dialog for Classic Mac OS, she needed a figure to place on the page to show the user its orientation and other options. She was working with an early symbolic font Cairo, created by Susan Kare who was also the designer of Chicago, the first Mac system font, and modified its z character of a dog to make it work better in the dialog. The result was a creature that looked like a hybrid between a dog and a cow.

In 1987, Scott ‘Zz’ Zimmerman coined the term dogcow for this curious beast, which by now was featured in every Page Setup dialog on every Mac, and was becoming quite a celebrity. A little later, Mark ‘The Red’ Harlan gave the dogcow the name of Clarus, a variation on the name of Claris, Apple’s software subsidiary that had been formed in 1987.

As Apple’s campus at 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, developed, Clarus was one of several large plastic figures forming the Icon Garden in front of the offices.

The dogcow lived on in Page Setup dialogs until Mac OS X was released, and early in the 2000s she was put out to grass in favour of a stylised icon of a human figure. Those who pined for the reappearance of the dogcow in OS X remained disappointed until macOS Ventura, when she finally returned, although now in full vector graphics glory.

By this time, there was another reference to Clarus tucked away as an Easter Egg in the Emoji & Symbols viewer: type the letters of her name into its search box, and you’ll see the two emoji characters of a dog and a cow, although neither of them resembles Clarus in appearance.

Although not heard in Mac OS, Clarus has been attributed the sound of moof, a portmanteau of moo and woof, of course.

The next time you open the Page Setup dialog, spare a thought for Clarus the dogcow, still doing the same job nearly forty years later.

References

Wikipedia
Macintosh Technical Note 31: The Dogcow, April 1989, written by Mark “The Red” Harlan
History of the Dogcow Part 1, MacTech, by Mark “The Red” Harlan
History of the Dogcow Part 2, MacTech, by Mark “The Red” Harlan

I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 270. Here are my solutions to them.

1: The periodical is secure when charged through this attractive force.

2: Quick flash followed by thunder for power adaptor and more.

3: Might of military planes would have been magic for 8 and X until cancelled because of heat.

The common factor

I look forward to your putting alternative cases.

Here are this weekend’s Mac riddles to entertain you through family time, shopping and recreation.

1: The periodical is secure when charged through this attractive force.

2: Quick flash followed by thunder for power adaptor and more.

3: Might of military planes would have been magic for 8 and X until cancelled because of heat.

To help you cross-check your solutions, or confuse you further, there’s a common factor between them.

I’ll post my solutions first thing on Monday morning.

Please don’t post your solutions as comments here: it spoils it for others.