Why doesn't MacOS have a Shelf as NeXTOS does?

[theprizerevealed]

Recently, I was reading about the NeXTOS operating system which was an ancestor of OS X. I discovered the Shelf feature and I wondered why it never survived into MacOS? Basically it's an advanced and powerful clipboard manager. It seems very useful. Any ideas?

https://www.paullynch.org/NeXTSTEP/NeXTSTEP.TechReview.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelf_(computing)

 

[dontwalkhand]

In a way, the shelf kind of morphed into the dock. No clipboard features there though, strictly an app launcher.

 

[mfram]

I never really used the shelf feature in NeXTSTEP anyway. Just didn’t fit in with my way of thinking. But to this day I still put the MacOS Dock on the right side of the screen. It reminds me of NeXTSTEP. Complete with the “dot” indicator that an app is running.

What I really miss from NS was the way the menus behaved. You could put the menu for your application anywhere in the screen. Even menus from different apps next to each other to go back and forth quickly. And you could tear off any submenu and place it where you want. It was awesome. The MacOS menu is so much more annoying.

 

[jerwin]

In a way, the shelf kind of morphed into the dock. No clipboard features there though, strictly an app launcher.

The shelf is more akin to macos's sidebar (in the finder and in open/save as dialogs).
It is distinct from the dock, although NextStep uses the same sort of graphics style. Perhaps users were primed to think of a shelf as a dock that was specific to a particular window. (I never used NextStep)

Here's a video showing macosx dp 1. Weird, huh?