Do you like the time-wasting animation the Finder draws every time you open a window, close a window (or an application) or align an object to the grid? I sure don't. For the open and close window stuff I guess it's not so bad, but when I want to clean up a bunch of stuff, it can take seemingly forever. (About eight seconds for perhaps 50 items when viewed by large or small icon.) And Apple hasn't given us the option to turn off this little show.
This application, Kill FinderZooms, will hack a copy of your Finder to disable these zoom rectangles. I made the original hack by hand this summer on Finder 7.1.4 and have haven't seen anything really wonky happen as a result. Therefore I feel it's safe to release this to the world.
This will work on Finder 7.1.3 and 7.1.4. These versions are seen on the PowerMac and with System 7.5. The application will only modify a copy of the Finder (one that has the name locked bit turned off). This is for your protection. This practically forces you to keep a backup of the original file... just in case. There's no guarantee that there won't be some really obscure nastiness that might show up later, but I've run the modified Finder on many machines for many months and have lived to tell the tale.
This is being released "as is." I will fix any reported bugs and may eventually pretty it up a bit. That's assuming I get the time (my research is beginning to take off. I hope.) and some positive response from the Mac community.
Feel free to distribute this package to all the usual places as long as you do not modify the program or documentation. Oh, yes, this does NOT apply to any service that makes money beyond the costs of distribution of the media on which the program resides, without my written permission. (This means YOU, Educorp, unless you are willing to fork over some of those bucks.) If ZiffNet wants to post it, I'll happily exchange it for free access.
Any bugs, praise or renumeration should be sent to:
Jonathan Jacobs
2374 Euclid Hts. Blvd. #407
Cleveland Hts., OH 44106-2745
jxj24@po.cwru.edu
(216) 368-3574 (lab)
Enjoy.
Version History.
1.1 You can now re-enable the zoom rectangles. Alert messages may be a bit more informative, as well. And for fun, this is now a fat binary.
1.0 Fixed a problem where occasionally the Finder wouldn't load (error -41). This was due to my failure to reset the locked bit for CODE resource 2. I am extremely grateful to Michael Hecht, the creator of "ResCompare" for helping me find this problem. ResCompare is a fantastic program. Thanks, Mike!
0.99 Uh, oh! Found a little typing error that could kill your Finder. Sorry about that. Fortunately you all kept your unhacked version, right?
