A complete history of WindowShade for Mac. From it's origins as a System Extension, through the Unsanity™ years, to the current replacement known as WindowMizer History of WindowShade
WindowShade was originally developed for System 6.0.7 by Rob Johnston, President and Director of Engineering, at Interactive Technologies, Inc. According to Wikipedia, Apple purchased the rights to this software from the developer and debut WindowShade as part of System 7.5.
When Apple released Mac OS 8, the WindowShade feature was implemented as a part of the Appearance Manager. A widget was added to the title bar to reproduce the functionality.
With the release of Mac OS X (1999), WindowShade was completely eliminated in favor of other technology, such as minimizing windows to the Dock, or moving them aside with Exposé. Apple apparently decided there was no more use for WindowShade.
A third party developer by the name of Unsanity, resurrected WindowShade for Mac OS X through a haxie™. Although the software from Unsanity ran great for a few years, ultimately, updates from Unsanity became non-existent. Users were forced to either wait to upgrade their OS until a working version of WindowShade was released, or update their OS and forego WindowShade functionality. By the time an update was ready for OS 10.6, OS 10.7 had already been released. When the developer started asking for prepayment as a method of voting on which software they would update first, I decided to give up on using Unsanity's version of WindowShade.
So, due to Apple omitting WindowShade from the operating system, and due to the demise of WindowShade X by Unsanity, I decided to create WindowMizer for Mac OS X. I changed the name from WindowShade to WindowMizer to distinguish it from previous incarnations of the software.
Misc WindowShade References
Thread announcing the release of WindowShade 1.1 (Oct, 1989).
Archived copy of WindowShade version 1.2 (March, 1992).
Requires a 68k Mac using Mac OS 6 - Mac OS 7. Ahh! The good old days.
Latest Version of WindowShade X by Unsanity
http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/6485/windowshade-x
Wikipedia for WindowShade
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WindowShade
Apple Support Community - Is anyone able to use Unsanity haxies
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3207117?start=60&tstart=0
Apple Support Community - How to live without windowshading?
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3911074
Waiting for WindowShade X before Going Snow Leopard
http://lowendmac.com/misc/10mr/waiting-for-windowshade-x.html
WindowShade for Windows (I didn't know it existed)
http://windowshade.software.informer.com/download/
Since there are too many annoying features in ML I am sticking to OS10.6 for the foreseeable future. Even so, and despite my love of Windowshade, I have stopped using the unsanity haxie. If you forget to turn off the APE module before a system upgrade it screws you up, and you'll be in so many endless loops that your battery consumption will go way down due to all the hard work the processor is doing. My computer has run so much more reliably since I got rid of it. Looking forward to trying windowmizer.
I too have been a lover of WindowShade since way back in the Classic days, and for that reason I have stayed with 10.6 Snow Leopard for as long as I could. Sadly, I could not wait any longer, as my work required us to move forward, and so now I am on 10.8 without my beloved WindowShade. Only today did I hear of WindowMizer, and I am very much looking forward to trying it out!