I'm wondering how widely known this doc is? I was doing some organizing of old boxes (trying to downsize my "collection") and I stumbled across a printed copy of this leaked? doc, I believe I got it somewhere off the Internet in the late 90s, at the time (I was in college, a Mac-head when everyone else thought Apple was going to be gone soon) I think recall being excited for what Rhapsody would be and thought it was very cool to see how folks inside Apple were thinking about it. By the time Mac OS X was actually released it was so very different... which I recall being somewhat annoyed at but willing to give a chance. In the early days of Mac OS X a lot of the interface seemed different for no reason to me and I'm not talking about the Aqua theme/colors. At least its wasn't as bad as the Developer preview which I believe had no Apple menu, but and Apple icon in the center of the menu bar.

This doc's creators propose an OS that while NeXT under the covers has a stated goal of being much closer to an evolved "Mac OS 8" interface wise. Interesting to think about the path not taken.

That dock on the right looks familiar. I believe this was something that was worked on for Copland at one point. There was even a third party shareware implementation you could download (though I can't remember the name of it).

In this Design Document its called the "Tray":




Certainly a concept they eventually abandoned.

I could totally have seen myself using this. Heck, I actually do like working in Rhapsody. The only thing I don't like about it is the slightly different Charcoal font which falls in the typeface uncanny valley.

That was a really fascinating document. Thank you so much for sharing it. You can tell that the people that worked on this really cared about the user experience. I am thankful that yellow and blue ended up sharing the same finder. And that blue did not end up running in a window.