Cryan.com:

The “View as Buttons” option was a distinctive feature of the Macintosh OS 9 Finder. It allowed users to view the contents of a folder as clickable buttons, each representing a file or application. This view was particularly useful for quickly accessing frequently used programs and documents.

I totally forgot this view existed, despite using Mac OS 9 for many years, because I never used it myself. This didn’t just turn apps into buttons with tiled square backgrounds — it turned every item in the file system into a button. I was reminded of it by a reader who used it in theater class in school to turn a folder full of sound files into, effectively, a soundboard app. Cool.

So many of the best UI ideas are little things like this. Sure, most Mac users didn’t want or need this view. But for those who did, they could do something cool with it.