Dogcow


The dogcow, named Clarus, is a bitmapped image designed by Apple for the demonstration of page layout in Mac OS. The sound she makes is "Moof!". Clarus became the archetype of surrealistic humor in the corporate culture of the original Macintosh group, particularly as the mascot of Apple’s Developer Technical Support as officially documented in Technote #31.

History

In 1983, the dog icon had been created by Susan Kare as the glyph for "z", as part of the Cairo font. Later, when designing the classic Mac OS "Page Setup" print dialog box, an example image was required to demonstrate the orientation and color of the paper. HCI engineer Annette Wagner made the decision to use that dog as a starting point, editing it and creating a larger version with spots to be more suitable for demonstrating various printing options. The new dog graphic had a more bovine look.
On October 15, 1987, the term "dogcow" was coined by Scott Zimmerman. She was later named Clarus by Mark "The Red" Harlan, as a joking reference to Claris, Apple's business unit for office software at the time.
The Clarus icon became one of the giant pieces of pixel art in the Icon Garden in the front yard of Apple's headquarters at 1 Infinite Loop; the Icon Garden has since been removed.
Apple's Developer CD Series of the 1980s features a dogcow logo on the discs.
The latest references to the dogcow came in the documentation for the Swift programming language, which uses the word "dogcow" as an example of the use of Unicode characters to name constants and variables; and as emoji in Messages.

Overview

The sound she makes is "Moof!", and in early versions of Apple Developer CDs one section was known as "Moof!".
The dogcow symbol and "Moof!" are proprietary trademarks of Apple.

Reception

The disappearance of the Icon Garden and of Clarus from Apple's products is seen by MacWorld as a symbol of the draining of culture and character from, and an increase in blankness and austerity in, Apple's products over the years. In a 2015 retrospective, the magazine said Clarus "came into being through quirkiness and serendipity, and you could say it has no business in a grown-up, commercial operating system. It makes no real sense, and wasn’t really there on merit or through strategic planning" and represented a company that was "kooky", "idiosyncratic", and not dominated by rules.