Apple hides a classic Mac OS Easter egg in Ventura

You know how during the macOS section of the WWDC 2022 keynote, Apple SVP Craig Federighi talked about how the “crack product marketing team” came upon the “stunning surf” and “lush alluvial plains” of Ventura, inspiring the new name of macOS? Well apparently, they also ran into an old friend while they were out there, and decided to bring it back into the operating system.

As noted by Shadowfacts, Clarus the Dogcow is back after disappearing from the Mac a long time ago. In the beta of macOS Ventura, Clarus can be seen if you open Page Setup in an app that supports it (like Pages) like the Clarus of old. Shadowfacts was also able to pull a high-resolution image from the Ventura code. Longtime Mac users will notice that Clarus seems to have found a good groomer in Ventura, since its coat has lost its pixelated look and is a lot smoother.

Clarus the Dogcow is a creation of Susan Kare, the graphics designer who created the icons and other graphical elements of the original Mac operating system. She created Cairo, a font set of icons that included an animal that looked part dog and part cow. Clarus was used in the Page Setup window to help the user with page orientation, but then Clarus disappeared.

MacOS Ventura is in beta and we’ll have to wait and see if Clarus will be included in the final release this fall. We at Macworld certainly hope so–after all, we’ve been pining for Clarus for years.