Exposé on Defender TD5

Exposé for Classic Mac OS: What Broke Along the Way, and Why

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 18:05:42 +0200

The plan article records the milestones; this one records the failures between them. Everything below comes from docs/LOG.md in the repository, the measurement log that every session appends to. None of these is a war story for its own sake — each one changed a rule, a build flag, or a line of the design, and the point of writing them down is that the next extension for this platform does not have to rediscover them.

Exposé for Classic Mac OS: The Plan for v1.0

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 10:16:45 +0200

The first article described v0.1 of an Exposé extension for System 7: a boot INIT and jGNE filter that hides every window of every application with the Finder’s zoom-rect animation. That is the core of what PB170 asked for on 68kMLA in 2021 — but only the core. The thread specified more, Crutch’s betas 3–5 added more still, and the testers’ reports named the places where it broke. This article is the plan for the rest, written before the work so that the measurements can be held against it afterwards.

Exposé for Classic Mac OS: A Show-Desktop Extension for System 7, Built and Verified in One Session

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 09:38:19 +0200

Status note (2026-08-29): this article describes v0.1, the first working version. The project has since moved on — windows are now moved to 3-px edge stubs instead of hidden, there is per-window restore, a control panel, a window-overview mode, a 68000 build, and a verified run on Mac OS 9.0.4. The current state and every measurement are in the plan article with its progress log and at github.com/LoetLuemmel/Expose.

In November 2021, a 68kMLA member who uses a PowerBook 170 with System 7.1 as a daily machine posted a wish: the one feature of Mac OS X he still missed on it was Exposé’s show desktop — a hot corner or a key that sweeps every window to the edges of the screen and brings them back afterwards. He attached a frame-accurate mock-up made in Macromind Director, a twelve-step algorithm, and a high-speed-camera analysis of the Finder’s own “zoom rect” animation. A second member, Crutch, picked the idea up and carried an extension to beta 5 over the following four months; it then stalled, and the thread’s last posts, years later, ask whether it will ever be finished.