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

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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Streaming audio between Linux machines

My laptop, being my mobile machine, contains all of the music I listen to on a daily basis. At home, it's nice to hook it up to my stereo so I can hear it throughout the house. However, while there is music playing, the laptop is no longer mobile and stuck within a three-foot leash of the stereo.

Having recently resurrected an old desktop to function as a MythTV, DVD-watching and backup machine and wired it into the stereo, it was extremely simplistic to stream the audio wirelessly from my laptop and have it be received on the desktop, to be piped into the stereo.

For this guide, I am utilizing Fedora 9 on the laptop (client) and freshly-installed Fedora 12 (server) with glibc on the desktop, although this should work on any Linux distro. You will need the following packages on both machines:

pulseaudio
pulseaudio-module-zeroconf
paprefs
padevchooser

Setting up the sound server

First, on the server, launch paprefs from the terminal. It can also be accessed through the PulseAudio Device Chooser (located in Applications -> Sound & Video), under "Configure Local Sound Server." In the Network Server tab, check all applicable boxes:



You may also enable Multicast/RTP, although this is not required for a simple sound server.


Now, start up padevchooser. An alert should appear notifying you of a new sound server.










Select the new server as the default.














Setting up the sound streamer

Now launch padevchooser on the client, and select the same server.







Configure your sound properties to use PulseAudio as the audio output. This will vary by distribution and by version, as the pictured F9 gnome-sound-properties dialog does not exist in F12.






















In some cases, such as XMMS, you may have to configure its output manually, in addition to the system-wide output.

In fact, if possible, it is far safer to configure individual programs to use Pulse if it is not already your sound device -- those of us using OSS or ALSA for system-wide sound, for example.















You do not have to have padevchooser open all the time. You can close it once the default server has been selected. Although the client's volume does not communicate to the PulseAudio server, the individual applications should, (such as XMMS's native volume control) as well as the volume on the server.

You may have to open ports 4713 and 59352 on both machines before the audio will connect.
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Copy-pasting on the Linux command line

On Mac OS X, since the Apple key is used for copying instead of Ctrl, copy-pasting works within the Terminal. On Linux, Ctrl-c sends an interrupt signal.

Instead, use Ctrl-Shift-c to copy within a terminal, and Ctrl-Shift-v to paste. Other similar commands are:

• Ctrl-Shift-t : Create a new tab
• Ctrl-Shift-w : Close the tab
• Ctrl-Shift-q : Close the entire window, tabs and all
• Ctrl-Shift-n : Create a new window

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