DragThing

» see dragthing.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

DragThing was a Mac utility for organizing files and applications into customizable docks years before Mac OS X shipped one of its own. James Thomson released version 1.0 on 1 May 1995, kept the project under his name through every Apple transition that followed, and stopped releasing new versions in November 2016 with build 5.9.17.

DragThing's peak years overlap with my college years, but i was running Windows XP with a Slackware partition for compilers, not classic Mac OS. the Mac at university was something other people had. by the time the iMac G4 and OS X made Macs visible to my circle, Apple had its own Dock and the case for a third-party shareware replacement was harder to make to anyone except the people who had already been on DragThing since 1995.

those people stayed. DragThing kept adding features that the system Dock did not have: multiple docks, tabbed layers, keyboard shortcuts to launch apps from anywhere, drag-and-drop file storage tiles. it was a power-user tool. the audience was small but extremely loyal, and Thomson kept shipping for them.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was ~

under the hood DragThing was a Carbon application. Carbon was Apple's transitional API that let classic Mac OS apps run on Mac OS X without a full Cocoa rewrite. it was meant to be a bridge. the bridge held for a long time, but it was 32-bit only, and Apple stopped supporting 32-bit user-space code in macOS 10.15 Catalina in October 2019.

Thomson did the math out loud on the DragThing site. a full 64-bit Cocoa rewrite would take about a year of work. the shareware market for a dock replacement in 2018 did not justify a year of full-time engineering. he made the decision to stop, kept the older binaries available, and pointed users at his other Mac project PCalc instead.

~ the day it died ~

there was no shutdown announcement and no servers going dark. DragThing just stopped getting new builds. the website still serves the last installer. on a modern Mac it will not launch at all, since Catalina removed every code path it needed to run.

this is the death pattern for most long-lived shareware on the Mac. one developer keeps something going for two decades, the platform shifts, the rewrite cost outgrows the revenue, and the binary becomes a museum piece. DragThing was the cleanest example of that pattern from the classic Mac OS shareware cohort, because the developer was honest about why he stopped and because the product was good enough to have lasted twenty-two years on a one-person budget.

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