Hacksugar: Twisting your browser

This morning, we posted a simple little trick for slowing down OS X animations by depressing the shift key. In the comments on that post, TUAW reader Rafe H reminded me about this sweet little trick that allows you to retain a warped (but still usable) browser window in your workspace.

By slowing the animation during minimization and killing the dock mid-transition (enter "killall Dock" in a Terminal window), the window retains the Core Animation changes at the point that the OS X dock is terminated. That produces a seriously eyecatching result that will please your aesthetics for... well, probably at least for seconds.

Check out a quick little video after the break to see how this works.

So why not warp all your windows this way? Given that the window dimensions do not change, even though the presentation is deformed, it's a bit hard to use. The links and text fields retain their original geometry, so where you tap and where you think you should tap are out of skew.

Want to return the window to its original look and shape? Just re-minimize it (Command-M), and then bring it back out from the dock. As a very cool bonus, the window retains its warped shape while in the Dock, as the screen shot to the right shows.

Finally, be aware that Youtube is playing back my screen capture video at several times the original speed. I'm not sure why, but it's probably because I captured at a fairly low frame rate. So use your imagination to slow the whole process down.