Directory Structure of Rhapsody

Navigating Rhapsody isn't too bad. For any one who worked with NEXTSTEP or OPENSTEP, navigating Rhapsody 5.0 should be pretty straight forward... Apple continued to use the "Next" directories from OPENSTEP.

From 5.1 on, Apple developed their own structure for how the directories were set up. There was a lot of redundancy in the system they used. Multiple Applications directories, Library directories, and the like sometimes made it hard to figure out where things should go and where to find things you needed.

One example is the Applications directories. Apps that came with the system are found in /System/Applications (with some example apps being stored in /System/Demos), but most third party apps want to be stored in /Local/Applications. And if you want a special set of apps for just one user, you can make the directory ~/Applications. I tend to keep all my major apps in /Local/Applications.

The following is a quick diagram of the layout (it is not designed to be all inclusive, just a general visual guide).