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There were plenty of Kaleidoscope schemes and Appearance Manager themes for those with Macs who liked Aqua but either couldn’t or didn’t want to upgrade to OS X

There were plenty of Kaleidoscope schemes and Appearance Manager themes for those with Macs who liked Aqua but either couldn’t or didn’t want to upgrade to OS X yet. There were some interesting “remixes” of Aqua too, including one that gave it BeOS-like tab titlebars! There was even one Aqua scheme that through some feat of wizardry managed to give menus soft, 32-bit transparency drop shadows just like OS X had. I have no idea how that worked, classic Mac OS itself was only capable of 1-bit transparency as far as I'm aware.

kalleboo 1y ago
The classic Mac OS (Toolbox) menu routine took over exclusive use of the machine when it was tracking the mouse in the menu - all multitasking stopped running. So an extension could draw whatever fancy effect it wanted when the menu was down without worrying about a background application drawing over it (drawing over the transparency) as long you made sure to restore what was beneath when the menu was let go.
- classichasclass 1y ago
  There were extensions that got around this, though. iTunes for the classic Mac OS (and I'm pretty sure SoundJam before it) could continue to play music with a menu open, for example.
  - kalleboo 1y ago
    Yeah you could do things like set timer interrupts, and starting in somewhere like MacOS 8.6 there was an actual multitasking (and multi-CPU) nanokernel running beneath everything that allowed you to schedule tasks in a more modern way. But those tended to have some pretty gnarly limitations (like I think in interrupts you can't allocate memory) so AFAIK they were only used for stuff like real-time audio, I dunno if anyone ever used those to do screen drawing, so in practice I can't think of anything that would interfere with menu drawing.
iSnow 1y ago
No, Quickdraw in 7.5 and higher (maybe before) supported 8 bit alpha channels. Classic MacOS didn't have a compositor, so redrawing windows was constant and expensive and I guess this was why they didn't do soft drop shadows.

kalleboo 1y ago

The classic Mac OS (Toolbox) menu routine took over exclusive use of the machine when it was tracking the mouse in the menu - all multitasking stopped running. So an extension could draw whatever fancy effect it wanted when the menu was down without worrying about a background application drawing over it (drawing over the transparency) as long you made sure to restore what was beneath when the menu was let go.

classichasclass 1y ago
There were extensions that got around this, though. iTunes for the classic Mac OS (and I'm pretty sure SoundJam before it) could continue to play music with a menu open, for example.
- kalleboo 1y ago
  Yeah you could do things like set timer interrupts, and starting in somewhere like MacOS 8.6 there was an actual multitasking (and multi-CPU) nanokernel running beneath everything that allowed you to schedule tasks in a more modern way. But those tended to have some pretty gnarly limitations (like I think in interrupts you can't allocate memory) so AFAIK they were only used for stuff like real-time audio, I dunno if anyone ever used those to do screen drawing, so in practice I can't think of anything that would interfere with menu drawing.

iSnow 1y ago

No, Quickdraw in 7.5 and higher (maybe before) supported 8 bit alpha channels. Classic MacOS didn't have a compositor, so redrawing windows was constant and expensive and I guess this was why they didn't do soft drop shadows.