DragThing was a shareware Dock application for

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and la ...

. Intended for

organization An organization or organisation (English in the Commonwealth of Nations, Commonwealth English; American and British English spelling differences#-ise, -ize (-isation, -ization), see spelling differences), is an legal entity, entity—such as ...

and as an application switcher, DragThing allowed for multiple docks with user-specified settings such as color, texture and shape. Dock contents could be organized into tabs and paying the shareware fee enabled the user to assign a

keyboard shortcut computing, a keyboard shortcut also known as hotkey is a series of one or several keys to quickly invoke a software program or perform a preprogrammed action. This action may be part of the standard functionality of the operating system or ...

to any dock item. DragThing won many awards, and in 2010 MacWorld gave it 4.5 mice, highlighting its utility for users who preferred using the mouse over keyboard-oriented launchers such as LaunchBar or QuickSilver.

History

In its early versions, DragThing brought many features useful in a multitasking environment to Classic Mac OS such as

alt-tab is the common name for a keyboard shortcut that has been in Microsoft Windows since Windows 2.0 (1987). This shortcut switches between application-level windows without using the mouse; hence it was named ''Task Switcher'' (''Flip'' in Window ...

application switching and an onscreen representation of running processes. These features were not implemented by Apple until Mac OS 8.5. DragThing was one of the first applications to adopt the

Platinum Platinum is a chemical element with the symbol Pt and atomic number 78. It is a dense, malleable, ductile, highly unreactive, precious, silverish-white transition metal. Its name originates from Spanish , a diminutive of "silver". Pla ...

appearance on

Mac OS 8 Mac OS 8 is an operating system that was released by Apple Computer on July 26, 1997. It includes the largest overhaul of the classic Mac OS experience since the release of System 7, approximately six years before. It places a greater emphasis o ...

and ran in the

Blue Box A blue box is an electronic device that produces tones used to generate the in-band signaling tones formerly used within the North American long-distance telephone network to send line status and called number information over voice circuits. ...

on Apple's aborted Rhapsody project. The DragThing release schedule slowed between 1998 and 2000, as its developer James Thomson was then employed at

Apple Inc Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company ...

. as part of the team working on

's Finder and Dock. He surmised that the built-in Dock of OS X would soon make DragThing obsolete. Thomson left Apple shortly after Mac OS X was released and resumed work on DragThing, releasing version 4.0 on 24 March 2001, skipping version 3. None of Thomson's code survives in the current shipping version of Apple's Dock. DragThing was first released on 1 May 1995 and celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2005. It was praised in a 2004 article by Bruce Tognazzini, who said "...if I could have taken all the lessons learned in Systems 1 through 9 and applied them to System X, I certainly wouldn't have ended up with the Dock. No, I would have ended up with DragThing..." In late 2018, the software develope
warned of probable end-of-life
This decision was confirmed in 2019, with it
website
updated to say:

References

External links

*
MacUpdate - DragThing
Macintosh-only software Application launchers {{mac-software-stub