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 Expose. 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 as a haxie™. Haxies were modifications to the system that used code-injection to perform their magic. Although software from Unsanity ran great for a few years, ultimately, updates 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 Mac OS 10.6, Mac OS 10.7 had already been released. When Unsanity started asking for prepayment as a method of voting on which haxie 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 Unsanityhttp://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/6485/windowshade-x
Wikipedia for WindowShadehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WindowShade
Apple Support Community - Is anyone able to use Unsanity haxieshttps://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 Leopardhttp://lowendmac.com/misc/10mr/waiting-for-windowshade-x.html
WindowShade for Windows (I didn't know it existed)http://windowshade.software.informer.com/download/
WindowMizer rolls-up windows like a window-shade!
Regain control of Desktop & Application windows on macOSFree Download
