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.
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.
Now add a twist: • Senders pay a small fee to send a message. • Relaying devices earn a micro-payment (could be tokens, sats, etc.) for carrying the message one hop further. • End-to-end encrypted, fully decentralized, optionally anonymous.
Basically, a “postal network” built on people’s phones, without needing a traditional internet connection. Works best in areas with patchy or no internet, or under censorship.
Obvious challenges: • Latency and reliability (it’s not real-time). • Abuse/spam prevention. • Power consumption and user opt-in. • Viable incentive structures.
What do you think? Is this viable? Any real-world use cases where this might be actually useful — or is it just a neat academic toy?