Five Fun Eye Candy Effects Built Into Mac OS X

Feb 20, 2007 - 12 Comments

Finder 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 all modern versions of Mac OS X though most won’t work on older versions that lack Core Image support.

The effect is listed first, followed by the keystroke necessary to invoke the effect described. Have fun with the list below and let us know in the comments if you have any other fun little eye candy tricks for OS X!

Effect Keystroke
Mission Control / Expose in Slow Motion Shift-Click F10 or F11
Zoom In & Out around Cursor Control-Scrollwheel (double-finger 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. You can try it on other drawn windows or UI elements too.

If you know of anymore OS X eye candy and effects, please share!

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Posted by: Paul Horowitz in Fun, Mac OS

12 Comments

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  1. dubas says:

    Try Control+Shift and click. It slow down it twice – so it is slower than just Shift and click
    Sorry for my bad English

  2. yo says:

    damn it too gud

  3. nueit says:

    Cmd Tab to go right ward,
    Cmd Tilde (~) to go left ward on dock. ;)

  4. fmortens says:

    I never found those effects to be cool at all – the hidden option to enable Compiz-/Beryl-like effects… now that would be something :o/

  5. UbiquitousGeek says:

    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.

  6. Jean-Pierre Nelson says:

    The slow motion effect works with F9 as well.
    Not useful, but so cool !

  7. […] Five Fun Eye Candy Effects in Mac OS X […]

  8. James Bamkin says:

    I want OS X Inverted all the time!!!

  9. lar3ry says:

    If you press Shift when un-minimizing an app from the dock, the reverse-genie effect will happen in slow motion as well.

  10. MurphyM says:

    The shift key works with the RSS button in the Safari address bar too.

  11. deck2 says:

    ha ha, thats prety cool tricks!!! i like them,

  12. parry says:

    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.

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