In Mac OS X, you can choose between two minimization effects: Genie and Scale. But there is a third effect, called Suck, which appears to be canned from the final OS, but there is a way to bring it back.

To use it:

1. Open window in terminal.
2. Type the following:

"defaults write com.apple.dock mineffect -string suck" (without quotation marks)

3. To be able to use this effect, you need to restart the dock. You can do this by either:

Restarting your computer.
OR
By opening the Activity Monitor application, finding the Dock application, and forcing it to quit. Once it quits, it will restart automatically.

I wonder why Apple removed this effect?

Maybe they thought it sucked.

It may have just used too many resources so Apple pulled it so their OS could be installed on older computers.

Probably, it appears to be very similar to the Genie effect, except it uses more resources, at least on my Mac. So it looks like you're right.


Hahaha! Good joke!

A second generation iBook G3.

I knew about this long ago, tried this on Hackintosh, real iMac, a MacBook, a MacBook Pro in Apple Store which magically had root permissions.
Anyways, Suck effect is still on the iOS (yeah, I know, I didn't use my iPod Touch 4G, because I'm getting used to 3.1.3 ):


And there's an easier way to do this:

1. Open TextEdit and write this in there:

2. Save as suck.txt (for example) in "~", aka the Home Folder.
3. Open Terminal and type in "mv suck.txt suck.sh"

Then you can just open Terminal and use "./suck.sh" to run it (if you actually changed it back via SysPrefs).

It's odd but enabling the "Suck" effect on my PowerBook G4 actually causes the dock to crash when minimizing apps that have large windows. Perhaps why it's not in OS X?

Well, why they couldn't make it Intel only. Hmm.

If I remember right the "suck" effect was in pre-10.4 iterations as well. Intel Mac's; while more powerful are still a Mac and have Mac issue. It may be odd to say, but maybe the effect was/is more than OS X can chew off?

This actually dates back to the original OS X Public Beta and the initial release of 10.0 days. Back then, the only minimize effect was the genie. Steve Jobs at one MacWorld in particular demoed the "new" scale effect. I want to say it was OS X 10.1. It was touted as slowing the system down less. Suck has probably been around since at least 10.1 and I'm betting takes as many resources as at least the genie effect did.

I agree with blackhole, the Suck effect was pretty cool, but it was definitely a resource hog.

Instead of typing terminal commands, just use TinkerTool.

TinkerTool is okay, just some settings can cause some bad problems. I perfer terminal as I know that I'm not tempted to play in things I shouldn't be, haha

Btw, the same, but lighter effect on the iPad:

Not working on 10.6.6. < 10.4 only?

It works for me on Lion, but a little bit buggy, though. No slowdown.