Charles Moore's The Agenda - Windowshading's Back!
Wednesday, March 5 2008 @ 9:46 AM ET | Article Link
One of Apple's worst decisions for Mac OS X was dropping the windoshading feature that had been included in the Classic OS since (I think) System 7.5, and was available prior to that as a third-party shareware hack. I know I became addicted to the facility of being able to collapse open windows in applications or the Finder to their title bars with a double-click on the bar virtually overnight when I first encountered it, and was dismayed when Apple chose not to include it in OS X. Boo, hiss.

There is a code hack posted by CocoaDev that brings back windoshading, sort of, but the authors warn that it is pretty crude and buggy. If you like experimenting, you can get the code here:
http://www.cocoadev.com/index.pl?WindowShade

A more elegant solution has been Unsanity Software's WindowShade X, another third party shareware hack ( or "haxie") that restored windowshading to OS X along with an expanded range of optional features like Minimize In Place. WindowShade X has helped me retain my sanity after switching to OS X from Classic, but calamitously, it (or more accurately the Unsanity APE system enhancer enabling hack was not supported by OS 10.5 Leopard at the outset.

Leopard's Spaces feature mitigated the withdrawal somewhat, and I don't think I could have switched to Leopard for production work if Spaces had not been there to take up the slack a bit, but there is no really satisfactory substitute for windowshading (definitely not the wretched Minimize To The Dock!).

Happily, after a very long three month's absence, WindowShade X is back for Leopard thanks to a new beta 2.5 version of Unsanity's APE enabler software along with Leopard-supporting betas of WindowShade X and several of their other haxie add-ons.

I wasted no time downloading and installing the betas, and am delighted to report that they work just fine. Ahhhhhh...... that spells relief. That said, Unsanity has issued "the standard goldfish disclaimer":

"Remember, these are betas. They have not had the test coverage released software has. But we do have confidence they won't completely make your computer explode. Even so, please open each product's preference pane and make sure automatic updates are checked Daily. Just in case something bad happens, so it'll be no more than a day before you get notified of the update.

These betas also have some significant user interface issues that will be resolved by the time their final release approaches.