How to disable autofocus and set focus to infinity? I almost never take any close up pictures with my Galaxy Nexus (and when I do, it'd be more convenient to manually switch into some kind of macro mode).

How do I stop the auto-focus from trying all possible focus positions every time I take a picture?

Such behaviour makes me lose all the good moments that I want to capture in the first place (due to a focus delay of about 3 to 5 seconds), and often results with pictures being taken out-of-focus, especially at night or through a windscreen or something.  Is there a way to disable such bogus autofocus?
I'm sure there's some way technically to simply shut off the autofocus, making the camera start up in a default focus and never moving away from that. It is however not a function that I am aware of that it exists in custom ROMS, because that's the only place you'll find modifications like this, and unless there's a big demand for it, it's unlikely someone will code it. I've got a feeling that camera focus might be really tricky to mod from the actual OS.

I think the only way you'll solve this for sure is basically learning to code and inspecting the AOSP source, or paying a developer to do it for you. I'm almost certain it's not a native function of the Android OS.