Unsanity

» see unsanity.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Haxie is the word. Unsanity made it up, from hack Mac OS X, and it stuck well enough that people who never bought anything from the company used it for a decade. It described a specific thing: a small piece of software that changed how the operating system itself behaved, in a system that had deliberately stopped providing a way to do that. Mac OS 9 had extensions, which were an official mechanism with an official folder. Mac OS X arrived in 2001 with no equivalent, and Unsanity built one anyway.

The company started in may 2000, first on audio players called Unsanity Echo and Mint Audio, then pivoted to utilities. The foundation was Application Enhancer, usually shortened to APE, a framework that loaded code into running applications and into the system, and which other developers could write against. On top of it came the catalog: ShapeShifter, which skinned the entire interface; WindowShade X, which restored the Mac OS 9 habit of rolling a window up into its title bar; and smaller ones that reworked the Apple menu or quieted the Dock. By 2008 there were about a dozen of them.

Macs were rare and expensive in Turkey through the entire period this company existed. The machines I sat at, at home and in the cafes, ran Windows, and the equivalent instinct there was to install a shell replacement or a theme patcher and watch Explorer fall over. So I know the impulse precisely without knowing this company's products at all. It is the same urge, arriving at a different operating system, and it ended the same way on both.

Because it did end. Injecting code into applications that were not expecting it is a technique with an expiry date attached, and Apple spent the following years making the platform less hospitable to it, without ever having to ban anything.

~ the dossier ~

~ why it broke ~

The problem with APE was structural. Code that inserts itself into other people's applications will eventually be present when one of them crashes, and from the outside it is very hard to prove it was not the cause. Third-party developers began blaming haxies for their own crashes as a matter of routine. Apple went further and said it would disregard crash reports submitted from any machine with Application Enhancer installed, which is not a ban but works like one, because it makes every other developer on the platform want you gone.

Then the releases did the rest. Leopard in 2007 broke many haxies outright, and users who upgraded with an old APE installed got kernel-level failures at boot. Promised compatibility updates did not appear for months. Snow Leopard in 2009 got a partial answer, with new versions of the more popular utilities rebuilt on newer system technology, but that reprieve was short. Lion, in july 2011, was completely incompatible with Application Enhancer, and there was no rebuild after that.

~ the long silence ~

The company Twitter account stopped posting in november 2011. The website did not go anywhere for a long time after that, which is the part most accounts get wrong. Archive copies show unsanity.com serving a working storefront, with the tagline about makers of haxies and other innovative products for Mac OS X, as late as 30 april 2013. Two days later, on 2 may, the same address started returning a 403 and it never came back as a store.

So the real span is thirteen years of a company and about eighteen months of a corpse that still took your money. Nothing announced the end. There was no farewell page and no final release, just a shareware business that stopped answering, which by 2013 was already the most common way for one to go.

~ what is still there ~

The domain never lapsed. Load unsanity.com right now and you get a single page with no navigation and no text, one logo image centered in a table on a dark gray background, its alt attribute reading unsane tools for insanely great people. Somebody has been paying for that since 2013 and serving one picture. It is the closest thing to an actual headstone I have found doing this.

The word outlived all of it. Haxie is still how people describe this category, and the category itself moved into a different fight, one about deprecated kernel extensions and system volumes mounted read only. Unsanity lost that argument first and lost it hardest, and the machine you use today is the shape it is partly because that argument was settled the way it was.

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