One big reason why I haven't yet upgraded to Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard",
aside from procrastination and lack of time to attend to the tedium of
a major operating system upgrade, is that Unsanity's WindowShade X "haxie" isn't
supported.
I'm a windowshading junkie, and I simply cannot abide not having
that feature. There is no function built into any version of OS X
that comes remotely close to being a satisfactory substitute.
Windowshading has been deeply integrated into my work habits for more
than a decade, and I'm not inclined or prepared to give it up.
Why Apple perversely dropped windowshading, one of the greatest
Finder features of the Clasic Mac OS,* when it introduced OS X
remains a conundrum to me.
Collapsing to Dock Is Unsatisfactory
Collapsing windows to the Dock? Fuggetaboudit! Not even close.
All those tiny thumbnails look the same, and my Dock is more than
crowded enough already. The body-English of rummaging through the Dock
with mouseovers trying to find the window you're seeking is
inconvenient and time-consuming. On a typical workday I may have two
dozen or more windows open and windowshaded, all conveniently
identifiable by their full title bars being visible.
I struggled along for several months without windowshading in late
2007 after upgrading to OS X
10.5 "Leopard", until Unsanity got a Leopard-compatible version of
their proprietary and required system add-on Application Enhancer (APE)
out the door. I latched onto the then-new Spaces feature as a
not-altogether-satisfactory stand-in for WindowShade X, although I
dearly love it for a bunch of other reasons. With Spaces, I could open,
say, email programs in one space, browsers in another, a text editor in
a third, and so forth, then switch back in forth among them by clicking
the appropriate application icon in the Dock - but I still missed
windowshading terribly, and it nearly drove me to distraction not
having it. I really don't want to go through that again.
Broken Again
Mercifully, Unsanity Software released a new beta 2.5 version of
their APE enabler software in February, 2008, restoring Leopard support
to WindowShade X and several of their other haxie add-ons, so it was
all good until Snow Leopard launched last fall, which broke APE and its
dependent haxies again. Apple is reportedly not a fan of Unsanity's APE
anyway, having announced it will ignore every crash log submitted on a
Mac with APE installed.
Too bad. APE has never caused any trouble that I'm aware of on any
of the Mac's I've used it with over the past eight years, although I
guess some folks have encountered conflicts with certain other
software.
Happily, last week Unsanity
announced that they're hard at work rewriting some of their most
popular haxies for Snow Leopard, although they're not yet ready for
public consumption - not even in public beta form.
Future Haxie Versions 10.6 and Up Only
Future versions of WindowShade X and Unsanity's other haxies will be
compatible with 10.6 only, and support for OS 10.5 and earlier will be
dropped, although folks still using older versions of Mac OS X can
continue using current versions indefinitely.
The reason for the support cut-off, the developers explain, is that
many of their haxies have "ancient and scary" code dating back to 2002,
and the APIs in the system have changed so much during the past eight
years that the code has gotten increasingly hard to maintain. And with
the gradual transition toward 64-bit space underway, it's apropos to
re-engineer the code, cleaning it up and using more modern technologies
such as, for example, Core Animation.
Music to My Ears
Last week's Unsanity blog reported that Application Enhancer is now
working solidly under Snow Leopard in both 32- and 64-bit modes, which
is job one, since without APE the other haxies won't work. Music to my
ears is that WindowShade X for Snow Leopard has also been largely
redone, with its MIP system rewritten from scratch, and it is currently
at internal beta status. It still needs some work before public
release.
FruitMenu is also
coming along, and Labels X, rewritten from
scratch, is probably closest to public beta release at this point.
Mighty Mouse
will be attended to later. Xounds and ShapeShifter are on
the bubble for possible discontinuation.
Anyway, the important news for me is that APE and WindowShade X are
coming, and I'm sure many other windowshading addicts are waiting
impatiently with me. Until they arrive, Snow Leopard remains on hold
for me.
