Control Strip

The Control Strip was a feature of classic Mac OS. It was superseded by the Dock in Mac OS X (now macOS).

Classic Mac OS
The Control Strip and its control panel were first introduced with the 68040-based PowerBook Duo 280 and 500 series, which ran System 7.1 with specific System Enablers. It was included with all other Macintosh models that supported Mac OS 7.5.3 and later versions of classic Mac OS. Modules for the Control Strip were stored in.



Mac OS X
The Control Strip was not continued as a feature of Mac OS X, which did not support Control Strip modules except through the Classic environment, which itself was phased out with the end of PowerPC support. Apple briefly introduced a Control Strip-like feature called Dock Extras in Mac OS X 10.0, but substituted it with Menu Extras in Mac OS X 10.1. There was an open source attempt to salvage the functionality of Control Strip modules with OpenStrip, but it too was abandoned.

macOS
Some of the functionality of the Control Strip was revived by Apple in 2016 with the Touch Bar in selected MacBook Pro models. It is context-sensitive with the running application and is managed by its own operating system, bridgeOS.

Additional Reading

 * Control Strip by Maria Langer, Mac OS 9: Visual QuickStart Guide, O'Reilly / Peachpit Press. ISBN: 9780201700046. 1999-10.