Going through the site statistics today I noticed quite a few search keywords related to minimising windows in OS X. One particular query appeared four times over the past week – ‘slowing down genie effect’.

Well, here is the answer – hold down the shift key and click the yellow button in your window top bar.

minimizing windows in os x

There are actually a few other tricks you may do with minimising windows in OS X. In system preferences you can select either ‘genie’ or ‘scale’ effect. But there is another one, called ‘suck’. This one can’t be enabled via system preferences, but it can be via the terminal.

So open your terminal and type the following line:

defaults write com.apple.dock mineffect suck

and hit enter. Now close the terminal, log out and log back in, and voila – your windows … errr… well … ‘suck’.

To return to ‘genie’ or ‘scale’ simply go to the system preferences and select either, it will instantly change to the selected one.

What is the slow-genie good for? I’m not sure, if not just to show off. But if you want to do so, then you may better opt for an Expose show.

Open a few windows, hold down the shift key and activate Expose, usually by pressing F9 on your keyboard. Your windows are being tiled in a slow-motion and it looks so cool.

But I bet you didn’t know about this one!

Expose has a built-in keyboard window switcher. Try this; open a few windows, activate Expose and then repeatedly hit the tab key. Watch your windows switching like the cards in a deck. Once you have the window you want to use, just hit enter and the window is all yours.

For those finding a similar thing in Windows Vista, I hate to say – this has been part of OS X since 10.3 (Panther) release in October 2003, when Vista was still called Longshot Longhorn.