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Disable window zoom, swoosh and eye candy effects and animations

G

Glyphism

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 3, 2011
13
0
Dear God and dear people.

I hope either of you are listening. I'm going to start with a question: Why don't Ninja's wear concrete shoes? Answer, because that would compromise there ninja speed. Enough said.

Does anyone know if there is a way to disable all the superflous special effects in Lion? I'm not sure what they are smoking at the infinite loop, but it's all getting pretty silly.

I'd like to edit/remove the speed of these effects:

- Slo-mo window scaling when going to full screen view
- Rubber band bounce effect, when you scroll to the top of the page in Safari
- Window zoom effect when going into mission control
- Puff of smoke effect when removing items from doc and sidebars
- Any other special effect that slows the UI down and might be removable
- Don't get me started on the bad 90's background hatch texture (which I've already removed)

There used to commands you could use in terminal to disable the window effects in Snow Leopard, there must be an equivalent in Lion?

I'm well aware that these come from iOS, and that it's part of Apple's strategy, yada yada... but I use my Mac to get work done and I'd rather not spend my time waiting for whiz bang smoke and mirror effects to finish while I'm doing my ninja business.

Any guidance is appreciated.
G
 
Last edited:
Lol. I tend to agree with you about a lot of the effects. Some can be changed in system preferences (or at least their impact on the eyes can be made a little less daunting). But I haven't figured out how to eliminate many of them myself just yet. Waiting for the "hacks".

And speaking of work and annoyances... I'm hoping that the startup sound disabler I use works with Lion. There's nothing like the Apple start up chime blaring through the speakers to bring a meeting to a momentary halt. (I don't have my Lion boot drive with me to see).
 
Thanks for the post iSimx. However I don't think it's good practice for me, as a general life principal, to give up on things without exploring how I might be able to improve them.
 
Glyphism said:
Thanks for the post iSimx. However I don't think it's good practice for me, as a general life principal, to give up on things without exploring how I might be able to improve them.
Click to expand...

Plus, in a year or two, there won't be any software left for Snow Leopard, let alone any new mac's that run it.
 
Not sure if God can turn off the fluff in lion for you, but the solution is simple. Take away all the eye candy from lion and you're left with SL, so just stick with that and you won't be missing anything.
 
Glyphism said:
- Slo-mo window scaling when going to full screen view
Click to expand...
The one which takes like 1.5 seconds?
Glyphism said:
- Rubber band bounce effect, when you scroll to the top of the page in Safari
Click to expand...
See above
Glyphism said:
- Window zoom effect when going into mission control
Click to expand...
WAT?
Glyphism said:
- Puff of smoke effect when removing items from doc and sidebars
Click to expand...
Which has been present in SL too and doesn't even take a second?



Seriously why would you want to remove small animations that take a second each and DONT INTERFERE with performance at all unless you are using a core solo and 1GB Ram?
 
I understand than many folks really love these effects. However my original post was an enquiry into whether people have worked out how to remove or speed them up. Would be great if posts could be focussed on this topic. Thanks.
 
Sounds like you'd be better off stripping away the UI and using UNIX. That's a snappy, efficient, no-frills interface that's all about pure performance. :cool:

But I do agree to some level. When you add animations to nearly every aspect of a UI, any sluggishness or choppiness in performance make things feel a lot less fluid. Every time I maximize a window from a small size to the size of my monitor in Lion, the animation is very rough on the eyes. On my smaller macbook (which has a much worse gfx card) it looks nicer just because it doesnt have so much screen realestate to traverse. Going even further, this concept works so well on IOS because you're dealing with the smallest screen sizes, so theres no reason not to animate the ever-loving crap out of any and everything.
 
Yes exactly. They do add up. Telling me to go use OS 9 is pretty juvenile. Let's all just take off our precious fanboy hats and look at this for what it is.

Apple themselves have even stripped the old animated 'sheet' effect that Snow Leopard had in dialogue windows. That's a pretty clear argument. It was a completely wasteful effect that slowed things down.

I have a high spec current MacBook Pro with 8gb or ram. It has plenty of power. However I don't want/need to waste seconds, which do all add up, waiting for trivial effects to take place. Anyone who doesn't get this clearly has never compared a 'stock' UI with an optimised one. The difference is amazing and can feel like a CPU or ram upgrade.

I stripped or sped up many of the UI animations out of Snow Leopard as much as I could, and it became blazing fast to navigate the UI. The difference was clearly noticable. Colleagues thought I was running some custom spec machine.

I'm sure the same must be possible from Lion.
 
Apple OC said:
a year or two? ... SL will still work fine 5 years from now
Click to expand...

He meant new apps. Many developers are considering developing MAS/Lion exclusive apps because it is just simple to do it.

Growl 1.3 is already going to be MAS/Lion exclusive.
 
Glyphism said:
Yes exactly. They do add up. Telling me to go use OS 9 is pretty juvenile. Let's all just take off our precious fanboy hats and look at this for what it is.
Click to expand...


Oh relax, it was just some good natured ribbing :). Sorry if you took it the wrong way.

Anyways, I hope you can find a solution to the issue.
 
There are usually settings for getting rid of these types of effects, but you'll likely have to wait for update "hack" applications like Cocktail, that allow you to interact with various system and program settings.

I really do wish that Apple would have options in Appearance or view menus or something for a lot of these, as while I don't dislike the effects, they help reinforce what you're doing, some of them aren't as snappy as I would like.
 
All the effects are timed so that they don't mess with using the OS. Quite different from for example Vista/Win7 minimize/maximize effect that actually does slow things down because it's timed too slow.
 
Glyphism said:
I'm well aware that these come from iOS, and that it's part of Apple's strategy, yada yada... but I use my Mac to get work done and I'd rather not spend my time waiting for whiz bang smoke and mirror effects to finish while I'm doing my ninja business.

Any guidance is appreciated.
G
Click to expand...

Ninja Business?
 
Glyphism said:
Dear God and dear people.

I hope either of you are listening. I'm going to start with a question: Why don't Ninja's wear concrete shoes? Answer, because that would compromise there ninja speed. Enough said.

Does anyone know if there is a way to disable all the superflous special effects in Lion? I'm not sure what they are smoking at the infinite loop, but it's all getting pretty silly.

I'd like to edit/remove the speed of these effects:

- Slo-mo window scaling when going to full screen view
- Rubber band bounce effect, when you scroll to the top of the page in Safari
- Window zoom effect when going into mission control
- Puff of smoke effect when removing items from doc and sidebars
- Any other special effect that slows the UI down and might be removable
- Don't get me started on the bad 90's background hatch texture (which I've already removed)

There used to commands you could use in terminal to disable the window effects in Snow Leopard, there must be an equivalent in Lion?

I'm well aware that these come from iOS, and that it's part of Apple's strategy, yada yada... but I use my Mac to get work done and I'd rather not spend my time waiting for whiz bang smoke and mirror effects to finish while I'm doing my ninja business.

Any guidance is appreciated.
G
Click to expand...

thx god ur not in charge of any UI decisions or we'd still be on OS 9.0
 
Someone just poke a fork in my eye... repeatedly, over and over and over again. The pain would be much less then having to read some of these posts.

kasakka: you are kidding yourself. You've clearly never worked with an optimised OS.
Haravikk: you're right. Something like cocktail is exactly what I need. No doubt it will come by a fellow Ninja who speaks my language.
jschmitt: damn straight, you read it right here.
bushido: you are awesome. That was a worthwhile contribution. Keep it up.
Tutorer: thanks yes I have my eye on these

If people's justification for an OS upgrade is based on UI effects then that's really quite scary...
 
Lion's most important features are 50% just Animations. If you want to have something without those then use an older System, period.
Also don't act like the few short animations are ridiculous, or silly, or were created by people on crack.
 
I see some people trolling in this post and probably didn't understand the OP.

Animations are nice WHEN they run smooth and doesn't lose productivity. If you work in front of the computer (spend many hours a day), have a bunch of windows open and move from one application to another, those "only 1.5 second" adds up and make you lose productivity.

Sometimes the animation is useful so you don't lose focus. An example is Mission Control (or Exposé). When you run it, your eye follows the scaling so you know where the window you were using is. Some people might dislike.

Running Safari 5.1 (in Lion) you see an animation (scaling from center, expanding to whole screen). I guess it's something like a quarter of a second and doesn't bother me. I would prefer an instant fullscreen tough.

The only animation I disliked in Lion is when you put Quicktime to fullscreen. The animation is okay (visually) but lags (probably because of my poor video card) and could be faster, maybe a half, or quarter of a second instead of a full second (I'm guessing the timing).

I think an option in System Preferences is not necessary but a hack (thru terminal) would be nice for advanced users.


People should know more about ninjas and samurais.
 
Thanks Miknos. I'm glad you speak my language. I'm sure some terminal hacks will start to pop-up. Please post them here if you do come across any. It would be great to put a list together here.
 
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