Apple's New OSes Hide an Easter Egg That Old-School Mac Users Should Appreciate
Here, the word appears, at first in rainbow colors, below a picture of a non-bitmapped dogcow next to a pool. While you’re in this dialog, you can also adjust the slider to control how transparent menus and other interface elements appear, a source of considerable grumbling among users of macOS 26 Tahoe. The definitive description of Clarus appears in a mock technical note written by Apple developer-support staffer Mark Harlan in 1989 that has long since vanished from the web.
- ▪Here, the word appears, at first in rainbow colors, below a picture of a non-bitmapped dogcow next to a pool.
- ▪While you’re in this dialog, you can also adjust the slider to control how transparent menus and other interface elements appear, a source of considerable grumbling among users of macOS 26 Tahoe.
- ▪The definitive description of Clarus appears in a mock technical note written by Apple developer-support staffer Mark Harlan in 1989 that has long since vanished from the web.
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| Publication time | Mon, 14 Sep 26 21:17:58 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-14T21:46:51.556Z |
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Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Apple’s newest operating systems, out today, hide a throwback reference to one of the more whimsical bits of one of the company’s oldest OS releases: Clarus the dogcow.Mac users with enough gray hair (or no hair left at all) should remember Clarus as a bitmapped animal with the spots of a cow and approximately the head and the tail of a dog, which would visualize how your choice of print settings affected how your text appeared on a page.More than four decades after the dogcow’s debut in a page-setup dialog for Apple's LaserWriter printer—with a moniker nodding to the firm’s Claris productivity-software subsidiary—you can now catch this critter in settings dialogs for Apple’s less-than-universally-beloved Liquid Glass interface-transparency option.
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