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Disable window zoom, swoosh and eye candy effects and animations

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
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SL had quite a few UI effects as well. What did you do to adjust those?
 
Used Terminal commands, Cocktail and Tinker Tool to strip them out or increase the speed of them. When increasing the speed the transition/animation essentially disappears because it takes place so fast. For example, the useless 'sheets' which slide out when you open a print/save dialogue window. Speed those babies up and the windows open in a flash.
 
Steve's Barber said:
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).
Click to expand...

Why haven't you started your computer before the meeting has started?


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
 
Glyphism said:
Used Terminal commands, Cocktail and Tinker Tool to strip them out or increase the speed of them. When increasing the speed the transition/animation essentially disappears because it takes place so fast. For example, the useless 'sheets' which slide out when you open a print/save dialogue window. Speed those babies up and the windows open in a flash.
Click to expand...

care to share what you did? I'd like to speed up the save dialog slideout, new window popup (like with TextEdit), and enter/exit full screen.

a lot of Lion's animations are annoyingly slow...this wasn't an issue in 10.5 and 10.6 since none of the animations (other than TM) took forever.
 
toxic said:
care to share what you did? I'd like to speed up the save dialog slideout, new window popup (like with TextEdit), and enter/exit full screen.
Click to expand...

Showing / hiding sheets:

Code: 
defaults write -g NSWindowResizeTime -float 0.01

Changing spaces (doesn't work in Lion):

Code: 
defaults write com.apple.dock workspaces-swoosh-animation-off -bool true # doesn't work in Lion

Window zoom (Finder-only at least in 10.6):

Code: 
defaults write com.apple.finder AnimateWindowZoom -bool false
 
Lord Appleseed said:
Lion's most important features are 50% just Animations. If you want to have something without those then use an older System, period.
Click to expand...

Are you serious? 99% of Lion is all about security (sandboxing, file vault 2) and document management (automatic versioning, automatically quitting unused applications and restoring their last state).

I'm looking forward to disabling the zoom window animation. It is very time consuming and buggy. For example, it flickers 3 times for 10 seconds when I maximize a VMware window. Animations are very bad.
 
cppguy said:
I'm looking forward to disabling the zoom window animation.
Click to expand...

Me too -- this is the only animation that really bugs me. Makes the computer "feel" slower overall, even though I know it's not. It serves no purpose, doesn't make anything clearer. And doesn't even animate when it closes.

Can't wait to get rid of it!
 
Hallelujah!

Code: 
defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool NO

Thanks, John Siracusa!

And it figures John would be the one to share that (first discovered by tomasf.) Here's what he had to say about this particular animation in his exhaustive Ars Technica review of Lion:

A newly discovered animation might delight the user the first time it's shown, but the 350th time might not seem quite so magical. This is especially true if the animation adds a delay to the task, and if that task is done frequently as part of a time-sensitive overall task. The Dashboard water ripple is acceptable because adding a new widget to the screen is an infrequent task. But if the screen rippled every single time a new window appeared anywhere in the OS, users would revolt.

Well, guess what happens every time a new window appears on the screen in Lion? No, it's nothing as garish as a water ripple, but there is an animation. Each window starts as a tiny dot centered on the window's eventual position on the screen, then quickly animates to its full size.

This animation conveys no new information. It does not tell the user where a window came from, since the animation starts at the final position of the window. Whether or not the animation actually delays the opening of the window, it certainly feels like it does, which is even more important. This type of animation can make Lion feel slower than Snow Leopard. And when an animation like this stutters or skips a few frames due to heavy disk i/o or CPU usage, it makes your whole Mac feel slower, like you're playing a 3D game with an inadequate video card. And for what? For what someone at Apple hopes will be a lasting feeling of delight?

Perhaps it could be argued that the animation catches the eye more than a window that appears instantly (though that probably depends on the size of the window and what's behind it on the screen). For "unexpected" windows like error dialog boxes, that could be a benefit. But for "expected" windows (i.e., those that appear in response to deliberate user input), the powerful, primordial pull of these moving images is an unwelcome distraction, not a benefit.

It's conceivable that this animation could delight some users, but I have a hard time believing that the enjoyment will last much past the first week. (Interestingly, this animation does not play in reverse when a window is closed. This, perversely, makes window closing feel faster than window opening in Lion.)
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Last edited:
I still can't disable the switch desktop/full-screan apps animation :(

I would be thankful if anyone could find more alternatives to disable Lion animations, or make them faster.

Thanks for the help
 
The only one that bothers me is the switch to/from fullscreen. I use Aperture, which had fullscreen in Snow Leopard and was virtually instantaneous. It's very slow in Lion and I go in and out of it a lot since fullscreen mode doesn't offer all the capabilities that are in the windowed mode.
 
talmy said:
The only one that bothers me is the switch to/from fullscreen. I use Aperture, which had fullscreen in Snow Leopard and was virtually instantaneous. It's very slow in Lion and I go in and out of it a lot since fullscreen mode doesn't offer all the capabilities that are in the windowed mode.
Click to expand...

+1

I can't stand it. Laggs with my Intel HD Graphics on 17" MBP. It is also way too slow.
 
Why do you put your apps in full screen mode? Didn't you get along just fine before?

Could you scroll to the top of a page and click a link faster than Safari could bounce back? I'm not you, but when I scroll to the top of a page, I can't click something within 1 second anyway, so the extra animation doesn't hinder my speed.

The smoke effect? Please... Are you saying that you're forced to stop what you're doing and wait for the tiny puff of smoke to clear before you move your mouse again? If I'm not mistaken, you can do other things while the smoke puff is animating. You're just being silly now.

Mission Control animation. When you activate mission control, your windows zoom out and find a place on your screen. Believe it or not, but when you get to SEE exactly where they're going, you'll be able to find them more easily. If there were no animation at all, a window could move up (or left or right) and you wouldn't know instantly... so you'd have to look harder for it instead of just seeing it move.
 
Chansey said:
Yes. It takes approx 1,3s and the animations lags. Previous animation took probably 1/3 of the time. MBP17 2010 w/ SSD.
Click to expand...

Hmm... I'll check that out. I haven't tried it since I've upgraded to Lion.

By the way... I still use Leopard's version of QuickTime a lot... I don't know why.
 
Animations can be highly useful. An excellent example is how downloads are handled in Safari. A file jumps from the web page (can't remember if it was even from the link you clicked) to the download tray. Wonderful indicator for where to find your file and that download has started.

I agree that the window popping up animation is pretty useless, but it takes roughly 200 or 300 ms to do its thing. There is nothing you could do to act with the window during that time, with or without the animation. Also speeding up them more than that would essentially get rid of the animation.

I think some of you might be equating what is apparently issues with the HD 3000 drivers to being a problem with the animations. I'm on a lowly 9400M and it runs things silky smooth.
 
kasakka said:
Animations can be highly useful. An excellent example is how downloads are handled in Safari. A file jumps from the web page (can't remember if it was even from the link you clicked) to the download tray. Wonderful indicator for where to find your file and that download has started.

I agree that the window popping up animation is pretty useless, but it takes roughly 200 or 300 ms to do its thing. There is nothing you could do to act with the window during that time, with or without the animation. Also speeding up them more than that would essentially get rid of the animation.

I think some of you might be equating what is apparently issues with the HD 3000 drivers to being a problem with the animations. I'm on a lowly 9400M and it runs things silky smooth.
Click to expand...

Sure they can be helpful. This on just isn't, it provides the user with nothing.

Here is a video of the animation. Quicktime makes the lagg look worse than it is. If I am using the GT 330M it doesn't lagg at all but it still takes >1s.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpUZ2XwgV5I
 
kasakka said:
I think some of you might be equating what is apparently issues with the HD 3000 drivers to being a problem with the animations. I'm on a lowly 9400M and it runs things silky smooth.
Click to expand...

I think the full screen animation is intentionally throttled down so you can enjoy (?) the effect. Yes it's silky smooth, but it's also s-l-o-w. Even on a new 27" i7 iMac in the Apple store it was painful to watch Aperture enter and leave full screen. Full screen was far faster in Snow Leopard or even Lion + pre-update Aperture.
 
No :(

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