MacOS Mojave Archaeology ⇥ uluroospeaks.com

“Uluroo” collected a series of examples of oddities and legacy support in MacOS. My favourite — other than the continued availability of a degauss function in Mojave — is their commentary on Dashboard:

Dashboard is still skeuomorphic. This surprises Uluroo a lot, given that iOS 7 killed skeuomorphism completely on the iPhone five years ago.

Many of Dashboard’s built-in widgets have a refreshingly retro, though inconsistent, aesthetic: Stocks, Dictionary, Weather, Calculator, Calendar, and more all look like they’ve gone untouched since the days of Scott Forstall. The World Clock widget’s second hand moves in the same way as a real clock, rather than moving in a smooth, uninterrupted motion like in iOS and watchOS. Apple still has a built-in “Tile Game” widget. Uluroo wonders if Dashboard will ever be updated to behave more like the Mac’s version of Control Center, or if Apple just doesn’t care much about it anymore.

The surprising thing, for me, about Dashboard is not that it continues to be skeuomorphic; it’s that it exists at all without a single update for years. What was once a top-line feature of Tiger has become abandonware.

(Via Michael Tsai.)