I like to use images of various quotes as my screensaver, but the default 3-second duration for each slide isn't enough for several of the quotes. After discovering that Apple, amazingly, no longer provides a built-in way to alter the duration of each slide, I set out to figure out how to change it to suit my preference. It works, but it's a bit of a pain, so if anyone knows of an easier method, please contribute.
I found the method on this page from CNET, the author of which apparently found it here. In 10.8, no matter how I tried altering the permissions of the relevant file and folder in the Finder or "unlocking" the file (as XCode refers to it), I could not get XCode (or TextWrangler) to write to the file, so I had to alter the CNET instructions a bit. (Side rant: I feel justified in refusing to resort to the terminal for a simple permissions change, a capability that has supposedly existed in the Finder for 9 major iterations of OS X.) Do the following:
sudo chown root /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Slideshows.framework/Versions/A/Resources/Content/EffectDescriptions.plist
This will set the permissions of the file as they were before.As I said earlier, this is an ugly way to accomplish what should be a very simple preference setting, so if anyone knows of a more elegant solution, please share. I toyed with the idea of having a separate screensaver file in my own Library folder, but I wasn't able to determine whether that would work. Given that we're altering this setting in a private framework, it seems to me that it wouldn't.
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20130215183522445