Revert Interface changes to Snow Leopard, Part 1: Lion and Mountain Lion

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For many of us, the graphical and user interface changes made between Lion and Snow Leopard, although few and mostly subtle, were unwelcome. Some of us (*cough*) were so utterly disappointed by the minor annoyances that a full reversion to Snow Leopard was necessary.

However, drastic measures are not always the answer. With a number of minor tweaks, the most obvious changes to the design can be reverted to a more familiar Snow Leopard functionality.
  1. Finder sidebar
  2. Scrolling
  3. Window animations 

The Finder

The biggest and most obvious interface change was to the Finder windows. First, new windows open to a default "All My Files" section. For most of us, Finders in Snow Leopard opened to our home directory or to the Desktop. In addition, many of the subdirectories such as Downloads, Music and Pictures may be missing.

Begin by opening the Finder preferences to "Sidebar".

Uncheck "All My Files" and "AirDrop", and check whichever other subdirectories you want to appear.

In addition, check "Hard Disks" and the computer name under "Devices", and the username under "Favorites". In this case, the user is "admin", and the computer is named "Lisiriad". As in this picture, your "Hard Disks" may have a dash through it instead of a checkbox. Uncheck the box and re-check it to enable all hard disks to show up under "Devices".

If you would like "Library" to show up in the sidebar, enter a Terminal and run the command chflags nohidden ~/Library. By default, the Library folder has become hidden post-Snow Leopard. This will enable you to drag it from your home folder view into the sidebar.


Next, under the "General" tab, instead of "All My Files", choose "Desktop" or "admin" under the heading "New Finder windows show:".

Next, we restore the colored icons. Begin by installing the SideEffects package, obtainable here, or here (direct link). After installation, you may need to either killall Finder or log out and back in. Your Finder sidebar should now have the familiar Snow Leopard colored icons, although they will look a bit odd.

Fix this by going into the System Preferences -> General and changing "Sidebar Icon Size" to "Small".


Lastly, grab and drag the "FAVORITES" and "DEVICES" headers to switch their places.

After all of the above changes, your Finder should now look something like this.


Scrolling


The other additions many found particularly annoying was the reversed scrolling direction, inertia, and the bounce when the scrollbar hits the bottom or the top of a container.

Under Lion, the inertia setting is located in the System Preferences under "Universal Access", within &  Trackpad" tab. In Mountain Lion, the setting is instead under "Accessibility".

In either dialog, click the "Trackpad Options" near the bottom. Change "Scrolling" to "without inertia".

To disable the reversed scrolling, enter the "Trackpad" pane in System Preferences. Go to the "Scroll & Zoom" tab and uncheck "Scroll direction: natural".

If you have a USB mouse, you will also need to uncheck this in the "Mouse" preference pane.


Scroll Bounce

To disable the bouncing effect when scrolling near the top or bottom of a container, enter the following command in a Terminal: defaults write -g NSScrollViewRubberbanding -int 0

You may have to log out for this option to take effect. To re-enable the bounce, enter defaults write -g NSScrollViewRubberbanding -int 1.


Window Animation

Finally, many of us found that the window opening animation, which is rather subtle, nevertheless produced a noticeable lag on any activity. This animation happens when a new window of any application opens, and a "zoom" effect quickly takes the window from nothingness to its full size.

To disable this animation, enter the following command in a terminal:
defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool 0

 To re-enable window animations, enter:
defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool 1






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Change a Mac user's password temporarily

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As a sysadmin, there may be times when you absolutely must access somebody's actual desktop for legitimate reasons -- or some clandestine ones. But in an environment where users are allowed their own passwords and are for whatever reason unavailable, and you either don't want to reset the password or don't want to be caught, you may want to reset the password for the duration of your use, and change it back after you're done.

The first step is to determine the user's hash ID. Password hashes are stored in the /var/db/shadow/hash directory. To see the hash IDs for all users, you can use the dscl command as root: dscl . -list /Users GeneratedUID

You will see a list of all "short" names for users and their hash IDs.
In this case, the hash ID for the user `drsavoye` is 6D5D3B6D-5D64-4396-ACD3-6FFCE4DC75E3. Now, navigate to /var/db/shadow/hash/, where you will see the files 6D5D3B6D-5D64-4396-ACD3-6FFCE4DC75E3 and 6D5D3B6D-5D64-4396-ACD3-6FFCE4DC75E3.state. The *.state files store information such as the number of failed login attempts for a user, whether or not the password expires and the last login date.

Make a backup, preferably outside of this directory, of both files. Now, remove them both from the hash directory. The user will now have no password, but they system still thinks they do, so you will not be able to log in with a blank password.

Change the user's password to something temporary by using passwd drsavoye. Now, you will be able to log in to their desktop with the password you chose. In later versions of OS X you may be prompted to reset or delete their keychain file -- "Cancel" or close the dialog, as you want the keychain to still use the old password.

When finished, log the user out first and restore the copies of the files you deleted back into the hash directory.



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