Five Fun Eye Candy Effects Built Into Mac OS X
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!
Try Control+Shift and click. It slow down it twice – so it is slower than just Shift and click
Sorry for my bad English
damn it too gud
Cmd Tab to go right ward,
Cmd Tilde (~) to go left ward on dock. ;)
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/
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.
The slow motion effect works with F9 as well.
Not useful, but so cool !
[…] Five Fun Eye Candy Effects in Mac OS X […]
I want OS X Inverted all the time!!!
If you press Shift when un-minimizing an app from the dock, the reverse-genie effect will happen in slow motion as well.
The shift key works with the RSS button in the Safari address bar too.
ha ha, thats prety cool tricks!!! i like them,
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.