Five fun eye candy effects built into Mac OS X
February 20th, 2007 - Mac OS X, Fun
Apple spends a lot of time fine tuning our favorite products, resulting in stellar looking hardware and software, particularly visible in Mac OS X. It’s not hard to impress your friends and colleagues with the appearance, fluidity, and many great features we all enjoy. But if you’re in the mood to brag and be flashy, here is a list of five fun tips to show off some of the eye candy that’s built right into OS X. These tips have been tested on Mac OS X 10.4+ and most won’t work on older versions that lack Core Image support.
| Effect | Keystroke |
| Expose in Slow Motion | Shift-Click F10 or F11 |
| Zoom In & Out around Cursor | Control-Scrollwheel (doublefinger trackpad on laptops) |
| Invert Screen | Control-Option-Command-8 |
| Genie Minimize in Slow Motion | Shift-Click Minimize |
| Dashboard in Slow Motion | Shift-Click F12 |
As you probably noticed, shift clicking slows down many of the Core Image and OpenGL functions in Mac OS X. If you know of anymore OS X eye candy and effects, please share!
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Comments:
Comments: 10
Comment from parry
Time: February 20, 2007, 1:27 pm
The shift tip works when you activate Front Row too, but it’s not particularly useful or exciting.
Hit command and escape while holding down shift, you’ll see it just slows it down quite a bit, almost painfully so.
Comment from deck2
Time: February 21, 2007, 1:21 pm
ha ha, thats prety cool tricks!!! i like them,
Comment from MurphyM
Time: February 22, 2007, 4:52 am
The shift key works with the RSS button in the Safari address bar too.
Comment from RomanO
Time: February 26, 2007, 2:08 pm
the most impressive effect i recognized was the box effect on user change or after install a virtual desktop tool like http://virtuedesktops.info/
Comment from lar3ry
Time: March 23, 2007, 5:50 am
If you press Shift when un-minimizing an app from the dock, the reverse-genie effect will happen in slow motion as well.
Comment from James Bamkin
Time: May 11, 2007, 7:50 am
I want OS X Inverted all the time!!!
Pingback from Slow Aqua Animations Permanently - OS X Daily
Time: May 22, 2007, 10:27 pm
[…] Five Fun Eye Candy Effects in Mac OS X […]
Comment from Jean-Pierre Nelson
Time: July 5, 2007, 8:19 pm
The slow motion effect works with F9 as well.
Not useful, but so cool !
Comment from UbiquitousGeek
Time: November 22, 2007, 9:02 am
This also works with Core Animation in Leopard. Holding down the Shift key while clicking on a Stack will bring up the Stack in slow motion. Also, it works when putting the Stack away. It’s probably the most impressive effect I’ve seen. It doesn’t seem to work with Quick Look.
Comment from fmortens
Time: April 22, 2008, 4:04 am
I never found those effects to be cool at all - the hidden option to enable Compiz-/Beryl-like effects… now that would be something 
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