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bring back Cyberdog, which made it easy for users to do their own web mashups.

Ever used Cyberdog? You could run HotJava in Cyberdog in HotJava in Cyberdog....

I remember when IE mac came out. It was just a hacked version of Mosaic. Yes, they were able to do a lot with that bit of vintage code, but it would just take too much work to bring it up to date.

When Apple abandoned development of its first web browser, Cyberdog, there was a plug-in to get it to use mac IE's rendering engine.

Oh, how times have changed!

Well, what about Apple's "data detectors" that were part of OpenDoc and CyberDog? http://www.cyberdog.org/dogbones/ has a download of CyberDog and a link to them, including the "Apple Data Detectors" and the "Internet Address Detectors" (note the link is broken) which sounds an awful lot like this technology. The web page is dated 2000, but I saw these working I worked for Apple, and I left in 1997, so it's at least that old.

Remember CyberDog? http://www.cyberdog.org/

Kickin it Apple Old School.

They should rename their browser "HyperLynx."

It's a shame. Apple doesn't seem to have a thing with dogs anymore. Moof the DogCow is gone and CyberDog was cancelled. Moof was the little dog that showed up in the landscape settings under Page Setup. Has anyone found him in Mac OS X?

I'm not too worried about the syncing aspect of this, as Apple or other developers will step in to fill this gap. What is sad, however, is the end of development of Claris Organizer/Palm Desktop.

I've used Palm Desktop continuously since 1998, when it was still Claris Organizer. The application has hardly changed at all in the intervening years, but in my view it remains the most elegant PIM available. It's also remarkably feature-complete for such an old product.

"Palm Desktop 4.0" brought OS X compatibility and some terminology changes ("Contacts" became "Addresses", "Tasks" became "To dos" etc.), but beyond that it was the same app. It even retained the scripts to open URLs in Cyberdog, or create form letters in MacWrite.

Now that the product has been orphaned, I'll probably switch to Entourage, which I find nowhere near as elegant. What are the chances Palm could be convinced to open-source Palm Desktop and allow it to live on?

http://www.cyberdog.org/

Cyberdog was a document-centric, OpenDoc based integrated set of internet applications. It used a precursor of Sherlock indexing technology to store email messages, and could search hundreds of megs of 'em in an eyeblink. It had no visible logos, advertisements, or chrome anywhere- there were no splash screens of any sort- FTP windows acted and worked like Finder list views. Links were stored in containers like yellow-lined notebooks, which themselves could be dragged onto things like email messages. I, personally, saw a loosely-collected list of Cyberdog fanciers assemble a stunning, shockingly complete list of Cyberdog references using this technology: one person said "We should have a list of cool Cyberdog stuff, like these links" and posted an incomplete list, five people dragged that embedded document to their desktops and dragged over THEIR links, and dragged it back onto their newsgroup responses, where ten more people saw that and did the same thing, and finally a couple people organised things: result, a collective data gathering effort that would take tens of people, done in an evening with Cyberdog objects, effortlessly.

Microsoft paid Apple to kill that, and OpenDoc, and standardize on IE. Cyberdog was abandoned. I used it for a year after that, until I ended up having to do some site authoring that used Javascript, and grudgingly moved back to Netscape/Eudora/Newswatcher. I'm still on that diet- and usually I don't remember how much poorer I am, or count the number of seconds that these programs force me to sit staring at splash screens to remind me I'm using them.

But... did you even know there was anything as neat as that, out there, ever?

Microsoft is not integration- Apple had internet/OS integration absolutely nailed, far better and more seamlessly and quite humbly and undramatically. Using Cyberdog and the associated programs felt more like the future, years ago, than my Netscape/Eudora/Newswatcher/Fetch setup feels now, in 2002. It wouldn't absolutely require OpenDoc, either- it was about the self-effacing, borderless interface that didn't need to make any kind of statement of "HEY, I'M RUNNING NOW! AREN'T YOU LUCKY YOU HAVE ME??". We could still have that.

We'd have that... I'd have that, right now, if it was not for Microsoft pulling Apple off the project.

Chris Johnson

(Personally, I believe that modern GUI kits should have an HTML control, but that it should be as tied down as possible - no JavaScript, image loading only via the app, etc. so as to make it that much more "secure.")

Here's a better idea:

Opendoc/Cyberdog.

Make it so there's a single standard html-rendering function throughout the entire system, but that the software component that provides the html services is hot-swappable. Therefore microsoft can ship some boxes with MSIE built in at the system level like you describe they just have, but if Compaq wants their machines to come with Opera or Mozilla or some kind of minimal no-frills browser (like you want) serving as the html component in place of MSIE, they can do that, and the system will be MSIE free despite the login screen and everything still behing html. (I'm not sure how easy this would be with the Windows XP architecture. I know that if apple's management hadn't completely fallen apart in the mid-90s, the mac os would have had this capability for years. I also know that in the current mac os x architecture, the same thing can be easily done using the Services component API.)

That aside, unless i'm wrong (and i usually am) if the courts have decided that the commingling of MSIE and Windows is illegal, and tells MS that the two has to be seperated, then Microsoft's "But look! It's impossible to remove MSIE from windows!" will be greeted with "That's your problem." It isn't the government's business to determine how microsoft fixes the messes they've made; it's only the government's business to determine which messes and which fixes are illegal anticompetitive actions.

I hope i'm right about this. It would be so wonderful to see microsoft's attempt to intertwine Windows with IE in random inextricable ways in an attempt to thwart government attempts to seperate the two backfire.. and result in instead of the government giving up and letting the two be one executable, Microsoft having to delay the XP launch for two months while they either build in an architecture for a Cyberdog-style plug-in-html-component (and convert MSIE into one) or remove MSIE, thus resulting in a lower-quality product..

-mcc, master of the run-on sentence.

Dancing puppydog? Hmmm... sounds suspiciously like a re-hash of Apple's abandoned Cyberdog suite.

Can they sue again on a whole new 'look and feel' violation?