Free: bring back the one feature from old Macs you can’t find in today’s new Macs

“Yes, dear Mac user. I’m a Mac-loving mommy of three who’s old enough to know better, and young enough not to care too much,” Alexis Kayhill writes for Mac360.

“Free is high on my list of criteria for new Mac apps,” Kayhill writes. “So is elegance and usability. And, retro stuff.”

Kayhill writes, “Retro? Yes, retro, meet Displaperture, the Mac app you probably don’t have, more or less don’t need, and does absolutely nothing for your Mac except bring back a little of yesteryear… Displaperture does to your new MacBook or iMac what Apple once did to all Macs. Rounded screen corners… The settings give you options for which corners, and you can adjust the radius of selected corners.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Note: Now remember, real Macs only have their top corners rounded. 😉

65 Comments

    1. Hi,

      I’m emailing the top ten apple websites to find who is interested in owning or leasing the apple store domain name in Spanish http://www.tiendadeapple.com. It was purchased on the day Steve died last year. People can’t believe it’s not owned by Apple themselves but I think someone internally missed this one. The word tiendadeapple in Latin America means The Apple Store. When a Latin person is looking for a Apple Store on the Internet they type tienda de apple. I would like to lease it instead of selling it but for the right price I would sell it so it can be put to use and make someone a very wealthy person.

      Best regards,

      Dennis Leonardo
      dlimha118@gmail.com

    2. I’d like to get HC going seamlessly on my iMac 27″ 10.6.8 SL.
      I still use HC constantly as my customer and contact base.
      Also use it to dial phone. No mistakes.
      Y’all can laugh all you want, but I maintain a PowerPC with ‘Classic’ that I access over Ethernet and run by Screen Sharing. I’ve been using HC since 1987 when I got my first SE, and it is still fantastic for this function. Yes, there is delay over the wires, but I’ve not found ANYTHING that compares to that program (yeah, OK, application or ‘app’ if you insist.) Just yesterday, I needed to streamline it just a mite. I assigned a key combination to sending ‘mouseUp’ to a specific button on a specific card so I could dial without moving the mouse on a card that had multiple buttons. Normally another key combo would dial the same key on any card. If you are with me still, then you are a true HC user. I’d love to get with anyone out there and discuss the intricacies of doing the update to OS X
      I’ve tried to go the SheepShaver route, but have not been able to quite get it operating. If someone has any information that might help me move into the 21st century, I would be happy as a clam to hear/discuss/implement a good solution.

    1. Yea, AppleWorks was the best! Especially Ver. 5, tear off palettes, macros, publish and subscribe, painting and drawing right in the word processor and a wonderfully easy to use database. Man those were the days.

      1. Yeah. I wish Pages had that capability. Old CWK documents that took advantage of drawing tools or a spreadsheet inside of a word processing document cannot be opened by Pages.

        I have dozens of teachers who have lost stuff.

        1. Ditto. I have graduated to FM (after trrying bento) but really miss the ease and inter-operability of Appleworks. Nothing else came close for ease of use at home, work, or as a teacher in the classroom.

    1. For once, I agree with Rorschach. Rounded corners were from an era where we used CRT’s that were difficult to use the corners without distortion or excessive bezels to cover the rest of the rounded tube edges. At the time, it took a little more effort to create rounded corners and was considered cool. Apple has many rounded icons now and round is just part of the look and feel to remind us that it is an icon (along with shadows and highlights).

      1. That’s probably (effectively) stolen from George Carlin. I’m not sure if it’s in the same routine as the 7 dirty words bit, but he used to say that on TV, (paraphrase) “you can say pissed off but not pissed on”.

    1. You can still add a CRT as a second display. 🙂

      You were probably joking, but CRTs are cool because they are usually “multi-sync” displays, so you can adjust the resolution setting as needed (to any supported resolution) without making things look blurry, like with most LCD displays. It’s only now with Apple’s Retina Displays that you can do this with an LCD and NOT get any noticeable blurriness.

      My second display on my iMac is an old high-quality CRT display (usually set to 1400×1050) that I got used about ten years ago for almost nothing (probably cost over $1000 new), and it still work quite well.

  1. I thought “docking” open Finder windows to the bottom of the screen (as “tabs”) was cool, in the old days before the Mac OS X Dock took up that space. That features was like adding “drawers” to your Desktop that you can easily “pull out” to easily get to stuff you need.

    1. System/Library/coreservices/setup assistant/resources/transitionsection.bundle/resources/

      Some of these are packages and you’ll have to use the “show package contents” command.

      The files are called intro.mov and intro-sound.mp3

      1. It’s nice that they’re there (they’re also on youtube), but the fact that no movie/song plays the first time you boot a new install of OS X is what I was complaining about.

  2. The old feature I miss the most is the ability to terminate an accidentally launched process by using command-period. It doesn’t work in anything anymore, and the “cancel” buttons which are sometimes provided usually can’t cancel anything.

  3. Appearances – with options for sounds and screen savers, icons, everything, all rolled up into different themes.

    And that AI therapist thing, what was it? Elijah?? It was awesome!!

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