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The September issue of Macworld Magazine has a neat tip for speeding up your interface a bit by changing the behavior of sheets.

Sheets are a part of the OS X Aqua interface. They are simple dialog boxes that are attached to a document window, sliding down with graceful animation from the window's title bar. Sheets appear most often when you choose to save or print a document.

This tip allows you to customize the speed with which your sheets appear. Speeding up the animation slightly can speed up workflow dramatically.

All that you have to do is launch the Terminal application and enter the following in the Terminal window:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSWindowResizeTime .001

This changes the amount of time used to display a sheet's animation from the default of .2 seconds to just one-thousandth of a second. It makes the sheets seem to drop down instantaneously. You can experiment with the value to make the sheets slower or faster to suit your taste. I prefer to set it at .05 which maintains the drop-down effect, but is still pretty zippy.

I should mention that Rob Griffiths at Mac OS X Hints was the uncredited source for the tip. If you follow the link to Mac OS X Hints, you can also learn how to customize the animation time of sheets in individual applications.