For us old time Mac users, the transition for OS 9 to OS X left us without some treasured features. One of them was something called “Windowshades.” Apparently, Steve Jobs, didn’t like this feature and it has been left out of subsequent OSes.
First off, even though I absolutely love Unsanity’s products and their implementation of “windowshades” is something I can’t do without, let me berate them for their lack of customer friendliness.
Guys, this is the internet age, you can post on blog in minutes. You complain that you received “tens of thousands” of emails asking you when your products were going to be Leopard ready. You could have avoided that hassle by simply posting a message, saying “coding for the new OS is slow, it might take awhile”. And repeat as necessary. Ain’t that hard.
Unfortunately, I bet you lose a few customers because of your horrible attitude towards your customers. That’s really sad, considering all of the good will your products had brought you.
With that being said, here are some screenshots of WindowshadeX in action under OS 10.5:
(Click to enlarge)
You have an open application and you want to see what is behind it without sending it to the dock, which is just a really cumbersome gui choice. In other words, why send it to the dock, which requires you to find the minimize button and then find it in the dock to bring it back to the desktop, when you can keep the pointer in the same place and use 4 clicks instead of 8?
Windowshade allows you to double click the menu bar and the window folds up.
(view image to enlarge)
It also has the ability to “minimize-in-place”, an open window. So instead of collapsing the window, you can have it hover off to the side (the browser window is hovering in the right hand corner)….
(view image to enlarge)
You can download the betas here.
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3 Comments to “For Mac Users: Unsanity’s Products Beta for OS 10.5”
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While I might not come down quite as hard on Unsanity, part of that is due to love of their products and an awareness from personal experience of dev issues. OTOH, the comment about the blog is pertinent – we have been hanging in the no zone.
Windowshades is an essential of life. OS 10.5′s spaces is utterly insane as a partial alternative – if it weren’t so buggy it would help. I need my windowshades desperately so hope the beta will do the trick.
It WAS helpful to read about the dev issues today with the Unsanity email – but really would have liked to know more sooner. Unsanity, keep going, folks. We need you – I know it’s hard to overcome the incommunicado thing but make the effort. Good luck for all our sakes.
I don’t think Unsanity were unfriendly about Leopard breaking their products. They made it clear early on that it had done that, and that they were working on the fixes. Do we need details more than we need them working on those fixes?
I, too, loved WindowShade when it came out for System 7.5. I’ve been sulking since Leopard broke it.
I guess my point is that you had hundreds of people posting at their blog.
Unsanity couldn’t have allocated one person 5 minutes a month just to say, “Look guys, there are 3 of us coding and Leopard just threw us a curve ball we didn’t expect. We’ll get their, it is just going to take awhile.”
That just shows respect for your loyal customers. And like I said, this the internet age, instant communication!
Heck, they are developers, they could have whipped up an Applescript to post the same message every couple of weeks : )
Anyway, all is well on my computer with Windowshades back in action.
Minimizing windows to the dock just makes no sense, gui wise, especially when you just want a quick look at the desktop.
Thanks to both of you for stopping by.