Dock & Genie effect: Stupid Hack of the Day
John Gruber has discovered that window contents remain live during the genie minimization effect on Mac OS X. There are other animations on the system that will also be slowed by the shift key. Exposé is the most obvious.
Here is a stupid/fun little hack:
- Type
killall Dockinto a Terminal window (but don’t hit return) - Minimize a window while holding shift (slow minimize)
- quickly bring forward the Terminal window and hit return
The Dock controls the minimization animation and, when killed while it is running, the above will leave the warped window on screen in its warped form. All of the contents in the window continue to display and work correctly, though mouse tracking is completely borked.
(I don’t remember how I stumbled on this one.)
August 31st, 2006 at 12:17 pm
It was on macosxhints a while ago. And I think linked to by Gruber?
August 31st, 2006 at 1:12 pm
This originally went around two and a half years ago. While I don’t have the original reference unfortunately, I know I was intrigued back then.
I didn’t try it out now in X.4, but back in X.3 I think the mouse usage wasn’t totally borked but remained in the pre-distortion positions. Scrolling looks fun in that situation.