Craig Grannell, writing for Revert to Saved:
I’m starting to feel like Apple has a vendetta against anyone with a vestibular disorder. Since OS X Lion, we’ve increasingly seen aggressive animations added to Apple’s desktop OS that can trigger dizziness, motion sickness, vertigo and related symptoms. These include slide transitions when moving between full-screen apps, the ‘morphing’ animation to and from full-screen apps, the slide between Launchpad pages, and entry/exit zooms for Mission Control. iOS 7 then introduced similar animations, along with parallax effects that made people ill. And now tvOS has followed suit.
iOS at least helped users, in providing a Reduce Motion option in the Accessibility section within Settings. Within six months, most of the worst animations were possible to replace with non-aggressive crossfades, much to the relief of vestibular disorder sufferers worldwide. But we’ve seen no such progress on OS X, and the tvOS ‘Reduce Motion’ setting turned out to be so ineffective that it may as well have played a little sniggering noise when activated.
The iOS team clearly understands the problem. My guess is, no one on the tvOS or OS X team suffers with a motion disorder.
OS X’s aggressive default animations — something that could leave me groggy and feeling ill for an hour or even until going to sleep at night.
If you know anyone on either of those teams, please pass this along. As Craig mentions, perhaps there’s a terminal command that allows you to turn off OS X animations. That’d be good to know. And if not, perhaps one could be added.
For the new window animations…
defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool NO
…and for most of the Finder ones…
defaults write com.apple.finder DisableAllAnimations -bool YES
I knew about those but neither affects the animations I’m taking about—the shift to/from full-screen, and the slide moving between full-screen apps. com.apple.dock workspaces-swoosh-animation-off used to work for spaces, but was killed in Lion (when the new animations were added).
Hmmm yeah, had another look and can’t find anything to affect the fullscreen animation. I did find that setting the Exposé animation speed to zero does remove animations when entering and selecting things (including desktops) in Mission Control though.
Edit: here’s the command for that…
defaults write com.apple.dock expose-animation-duration -int 0
Restart dock after (killall Dock)
Yeah, I use that one and a bunch of springboard Terminal commands to make Launchpad usable. defaults write com.apple.dock springboard-page-duration -float 0 (and page replaced with show/hide in additional commands). Spaces is the holy grail though.
The bigger issue is how many people think VR will be the future. It will probably never be the future from people who suffer from motion sickness. I do, to some extent. I don’t mind the animations, but I can’t play any 3d video games without getting dizzy and feeling like I’m going to throw up. It’s awful.
I haven’t used it in a while (and I don’t have El-Capitan), so I might be wrong but OnyX made it easy to access controls to turn off animation.
OnyX?
Yep. Or even people with glasses, for that matter.
Not really of the sort I’m taking about, unfortunately. You can disable a few effects, but the big one is the full-screen slide between apps, and the associated entry/exit animation.