Apps we can't live without: DragThing
For many people—particularly those who’ve come to the Mac after first using an iOS device—there was and always has been Mac OS X. Before that… darkness. In truth, Apple has left a long trail of OS revisions in its wake—from System 1.x to Mac OS 9.x. (Apple changed its OS naming scheme from System This to Mac OS That when it moved from System 7.5 to Mac OS 7.6.) In these earlier days of the Mac’s operating system you couldn’t fling a brick in any compass direction without hitting some utility that attempted to make that operating system better (or more attractive or, in far too many cases, goofier).
For those who weren’t there, the pre-OS X Mac OS was quite a different beast. Oh sure, you still double-clicked this and dragged that, but things we take for granted just didn’t exist in those days. What, you want your Mac to operate for an entire day without crashing? Dreamer. You say you’d like to share a printer with the other computers in your home? Take a class. Broadband? Is 2400 baud broad enough for you, buddy? In short, powerful and cool though my Power Mac 6100 and, later, Power Computing Power Tower 180e, seemed at the time, the Mac OS was still on the clumsy side.
Third-party developers made some interesting efforts to deal with that clumsiness. Under Mac OS 9 and earlier, those developers had greater opportunities to muck with the Finder and low-level functions on the Mac. You could slap themes on your Mac sixteen ways to Sunday, use ResEdit to place the ugliest fonts imaginable in the menu bar, and, oh, those flying toasters. One of the areas that developers found particularly interesting was application launching. In those dockless days, launching an application was pretty tedious: Dig down into one folder or another, double-click the item you sought, and you were on your way.
Like many people I used Now Utilities and its Now Menus component, which placed hierarchical menus within the Apple menu. (Yes, this was a really big deal at the time). And while that was a better solution than rooting around in one folder or another seeking a favorite application, it still required a fair bit of mousing around and dealing with menus that could be quite clumsy.
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http://www.macworld.com/article/2025380/apps-we-cant-live-without-dragthing.html
