James Thomson on the Origins of the MacOS Dock

James Thomson:

So, we are coming up on a little anniversary for me this weekend. On the 5th of January 2000, Steve Jobs unveiled the new Aqua user interface of Mac OS X to the world at Macworld Expo.

Towards the end of the presentation, he showed off the Dock. You all know the Dock, it’s been at the bottom of your Mac screen for what feels like forever (if you keep it in the correct location, anyway).

I would not accept this Dock placement blasphemy from anyone else, but from Thomson, well, OK. (The correct location is on the right. Left, we’ll let you argue for. But definitely not on the bottom.)

I didn’t design the dock — that was Bas Ording, a talented young UI designer that Steve had personally recruited. But it was my job to take his prototypes built in Macromind Director and turn them into working code, as part of the Finder team.

I had already written another dock — DragThing — before I worked for Apple, and that had helped me get a job there. I moved over from Scotland to Ireland in late 1996 with my future wife, with both of us joining the small software team there. It was primarily a manufacturing plant, but there was a little bit of software and hardware testing and engineering that went on around the edges.

In the middle of all that, when I was out in Cupertino, I was asked if I wanted to work on a secret project with the code name “Überbar”. I was shown some prototypes and basically told that six people had seen it, and if it leaked they would know it was me that had talked. I figured if anybody was finally going to kill off DragThing, it might as well be me.

I’ve heard most of this story over the years — from James — but never all in one narrative like this. There are a lot of 25-year-old stories about how Mac OS X came together that I hope the participants start sharing. Even Apple folks should be free to talk about quarter-century-old work — and both the work and the stories are so good.

★ Friday, 10 January 2025