Cool (and Useless) Snow Leopard Feature

Today I discovered a very cool, though entirely useless “feature” in OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard). I hesitate to call it a feature simply because it serves no purpose other than being awesome, but I call it so for want of a better term. The feature is this: OS X animates icon rearrangements on the Desktop. That is, if you change the arrangement (be it the sort order, location, or otherwise) of the icons on the Desktop, the changes are animated.

Suppose your Desktop contains two folders, named “A” and “B,” and is currently set to arrange icons by name. Thus folder “A” appears above folder “B” on the Desktop. Then suppose you rename folder “A” to “C.” After the re-name, folder “C” (the former folder “A”) will appear below folder “B” and both folders will shift upward. In Leopard (and previous releases of OS X), the changes would occur instantly, but Snow Leopard adds a little flair by animating the swap of these folders’ locations.

After some experimentation, I discovered that this pretty animation only happens on the actual Desktop. OS X won’t perform such an animation in a Finder window, for example.

Not a very useful feature, but a clever addition to OS X.

Until next time,

You are cleared for launch!

SS77