5 Tweaks to make OSX Lion Kick-Ass

Lion is here! No doubt, you’ve already gone out and downloaded a shiny new copy of it off the app store. I, myself, decided to wait until I could get a shiny new MacBook Pro, with Lion pre-installed, seeing as how my old MacBook is nearly 3 years old. Unfortunately, having been using OSX Lion for a few weeks now I’ve already found a number of things, minor changes they added to Lion, that generally piss me off. Don’t get me wrong, though, most of the changes I love, wether I fell in love right away, or took a few days to get used to them and now feel rather awkward when going back to a Snow Leopard Mac without them. Luckily, I have found ways to fix almost all of the most glaring discrepancies I have with my new feline friend from Apple.

“Natural” Scrolling

First up, is the new “Natural” Scrolling! I don’t know what you think, personally, but I don’t see what is natural about this feature. It makes perfect sense on a touch screen, because there you are actually imitating grabbing the content itself and moving it in the direction you want it to move. It makes absolutely no sense when using a mouse. Lucky for us, Apple provided a very easy way to turn this rather stupid functionality off. Go to ‘System Preferences…’ -> ‘Mouse’ (or ‘Trackpad’) at the very top you will see a checkbox for ‘Scrolling direction: natural’.

Uncheck it and Voilà! You now have your normal scrolling back!

Giant Icons

Now, I don’t know if you noticed this, but in Lion they seem to have tried to make a lot of things bigger, one of the things that annoyed me most were these icons in the sidebar of a finder window.

Once again, Apple has given us a way to fix this minor annoyance, but this time they decided to hide it away in a rather odd place. Go to ‘System Preferences…’ -> ‘General’. In the drop down for ‘Sidebar icon size:’ select small.

This will bring those pesky icons back down to a more tolerable size.

Status Bar

Another tweak in the initial settings of finder in OSX Lion is that they decided to hide the status bar initially.  Another decision that I can’t seem to figure out what reason they may have had to make it.

Thankfully, this is an easy fix, as this was functionality already in place in previous OS versions, all they did was decided to change the initial configuration of it. Just go to Finder and press ‘Command’ + ‘/’ (or go to ‘View’ -> ‘Show Status Bar’) and there you go! You’ve got your status bar back in Finder!

Missing Hard Disk

Now if you look at the ‘Devices’ section on the sidebar in Finder, you’ll notice that your own hard disk is not shown there!

Want it back? I know I sure did! Just go to ‘Finder’ -> ‘Preferences…’ (or press ‘Command’ + ‘,’) and select the ‘Sidebar’ tab. At the very bottom, under the ‘Devices’ section is a checkbox for ‘Hard disks’. Click it until it changes to a checkmark and you’ll have you’re happy little Hard Disk displaying in every finder window once again!

Those Pesky Gestures

This right here, has been my biggest issue with OSX ever since Snow Leopard and the Magic Mouse were released. They’ve been pushing this one for years now!

“Gestures! Everybody loves them! Use them! They’re awesome! Use Mac, because we have gestures! Gestures! Yay!”

So, what I want to know is, why the hell do we still not have them? I mean sure we’ve got a couple here and there in Lion, swipe up/down for ‘Mission Control’ / ‘App Expose’, pinch in/out for ‘Launchpad’ / ‘Show Desktop’, scroll left and right with two/four fingers for ‘Swipe between pages’ / ‘Swipe between full-screen apps’. But, that’s pretty much it, and that’s pretty much only on the trackpad! Why Apple, why have you left out my dear friend the Magic Mouse? Why do you push so hard to make us want gestures, but give us absolutely nothing? All I have to say in response to my own question is, Better Touch Tool, get it.

This application has been around for much longer than I’ve known about it, and it is fantastic. Seriously, go get it! Not only does it allow you to use just about every possible gesture you can think of on either your trackpad or the lovely Magic Mouse, it also lets you customize different gestures for different applications and set your gestures to any function or key combination you could possibly want. It even allows for pressing function keys (‘command’, ‘option’, ‘control’, ‘shift’, ‘fn’) while making gestures for alternate functionality. Finally! You can now use your gestures the way Apple has been promising you can for years! Yay!

Unleash The Beast

So, now that you’re shiny new Apple feline is cleaned up and a little bit tamer, get out there and enjoy your Mac just as Apple wants you to! He’s faster, cleaner, and at least twice as vicious as your old friend the Snow Leopard. He’s Lion and now you can unleash his full, unbridled fury and incredible speed.