I'm going to do something I don't normally do, and repeat a previous hint. However, when the original hint was posted, I think the context sort of misled some folks (myself included) about what you could do with the hint.
You're probably all familiar with sheets, those "dialog boxes" that slide out of the window that called them -- you'll see them in both Carbon and Cocoa applications when you do things like Print, Save As, etc. When used for Save As (or any other dialog that shows the file system), you can also resize the sheets, which is very handy. However, you also have to sit through the 'dropping from the window title' animation each time a sheet becomes active, as seen in this short movie clip. This can take a bit of time, and if you use sheets a lot, it can get tedious to watch.
Back in October, we ran a hint called Change the smooth window resize speed for Cocoa applications. This hint discussed using the NSWindowResizeTime global preference setting in the Terminal to control the speed of the sheet animation. I think there were a couple things in that hint, though, that caused me (and perhaps others) to miss the real applicability: it only talked about Cocoa apps, and it discussed slowing down, not speeding up, the animation -- it proposed a setting of 2.0 to slow down the animation.
Yesterday, while working on some other stuff, I re-ran the command, but used a much lower setting:
defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSWindowResizeTime .001After quitting and restarting TextEdit, the time required to open and close the sheet changed dramatically, as seen in this 'after' movie of the same file and application. And it's not just Cocoa applications; many Carbon applications, such as Word and Excel, rely on sheets as well.
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2004051208143172