The curious little artifacts of a modern (major) macOS thread

[B S Magnet]

This thread probably shouldn’t even exist, but maybe it ought to.

Have you run into quirks in macOS/OS X which hint at residual, surviving code from as far back as the Mac OS Classic days?

I just found one!

In High Sierra, importing images from a device in Image Capture (an application with OS X 10.0 roots), whose original file names exceed 31 characters, are truncated at exactly 31 characters when imported.

(For those of you who never used Mac OS before OS X, 31 characters was the limit of a filename length during the old Mac OS 9-and-earlier, HFS days.)

Only tonight did I make this peculiar discovery. And this is on a system running APFS. So I’m half-wondering whether this was a known quirk internally. Other than truncation, functionality is unaffected.

 

[retta283]

Wow, this is a very interesting idea for a thread! These are the kinds of things that interest me, completely random little leftovers from past times.

The only thing that instantly springs to mind is the Stickies app, which is an antique in its own right. It has an OS 9 icon in one of the default notes that it starts you with, and if you hover over the notes you can see that the default notes date from 2003. The window controls are also using the same graphics and layout as OS 9, so to maximize the app you go into the right corner instead of it being grouped with the close icon. This is all as of Sierra/High Sierra, but I suspect it's unchanged to the present day.