What Apple thought Rhapsody would become

[bottleworks]

Hi. This might have been posted before. I have a lot of stuff hidden away and I found some images on a drive that might be of interest to some. This came out of a PDF of an Apple internal document talking about what the user interface of Rhapsody should be like. I know I have the PDF somewhere. I'll find it someday, but for now I have these screenshots. If this is old news, sorry (I guess it is).

 

[CC_333]

These screenshots actually sort of resemble what Mac OS X ended up being, except with the Platinum UI instead of Aqua, and a more Mac OS 8/9-ish arrangement of various widgets.

That bar on the right of the desktop that contains, among other things, the Trash must be some predecessor to the Dock, maybe?

Were these screenshots of a real variant of Rhapsody that actually existed (an alpha or very early, as yet unreleased beta, perhaps), or are they mostly mockups?

c

 

[joshc]

I know I have the PDF somewhere.

I for one would be interested in seeing it, if you can find it.

 

[MrFahrenheit]

I have seen these screenshots and descriptions before.

When I was a registered Apple developer, I would receive CDs and documents in the mail, and by email. I have seen this document, in full, before. Tracking it down among my stuff would likely be an impossible task.

There were multiple versions of this document, over time and as Rhapsody evolved. I think they are mostly mock-ups and not screenshots of an actual running system.

It seems that at the very start, which these screenshots look like they’re from, the Copland and Rhapsody teams were trying to make Rhapsody look and feel mostly like Copland out of the NextStep.

However, I think Steve knew that in order to sell this new operating system, a completely new GUI theme would be necessary. I did like Aqua and all, but I wonder if Apple would have been able to sell their system as more of a powerful workstation had they continued on this refined “Copland” style instead.

Anyways, thanks for the post @bottleworks and I hope you locate the full PDF file.

 

[LaPorta]

Very cool stuff, always interesting to see these kinds of things.

 

[bottleworks]

When I was a registered Apple developer, I would receive CDs and documents in the mail, and by email.

Me too! Maybe that's where it came from (I have no memory anymore). I still have some of those CDs in one of those Orange and white boxes that they sent (IIRC). I'll have to go through those and see what I can find.

 

[Arbee]

There's a fair amount of Copland material on Bitsavers now, including a complete draft of an Addison-Wesley book intended to introduce "Mac OS 8" to developers and technically-oriented users. Some of the screenshots/mockups hint at a dock-like thing at the bottom of the screen, but nothing like what's here. Kind of shows what Apple's designers were thinking going into Rhapsody.

Index of /pdf/apple/mac/developer/Copland

 

[slomacuser]

There were multiple versions of this document, over time and as Rhapsody evolved. I think they are mostly mock-ups and not screenshots of an actual running system.

It seems that at the very start, which these screenshots look like they’re from, the Copland and Rhapsody teams were trying to make Rhapsody look and feel mostly like Copland out of the NextStep.

Totally agree. These looks more Copland than Rhapsody and Rhapsody didn’t have Finder until Mac OS X DP2.

 

[CC_333]

It's interesting that that these are probably mockups of a refined Copland look. I actually kind of like it.

As @MrFahrenheit said, Aqua is fine and good, but I think I would've liked Mac OS X somewhat better if it looked like this!

By the way, you all knew that DP2 or DP3 could be reverted to the Rhapsody-native Platinum UI by removing a couple of files, yes?

If only that trick worked in the RTM version....

c