What are some of the best OS X Lion tips, tricks, and tweaks so far?

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Apple Mac OS X Lion (10.7)

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ryan July 23, 2011

What are some of the best OS X Lion tips, tricks, and tweaks so far?

Well, we've all been dug into Lion for a few days now, and if you're anything like me you've accumulated a few must-have tips, tricks, hacks, tweaks, secret settings, hidden preferences, and otherwise obscure mods for the new OS. What are yours? Drop 'em here!

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jaminagosti 1 year ago

Use the Annotate menu in Preview to sign a PDF.
Lion will pop-up a login window if you are connecting to a hot-spot. No browser needed!

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gomer43 1 year ago

Want to catch up on some news or other online reading, but don't have time? Make the item into a spoken track.

Highlight any text, right-click (or ctrl-click), select Services, and click Add to iTunes as a spoken track. (Sometimes it's in the main context menu, not under Services.) Voilá!

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ryan 1 year ago

Here are a few of my favorites so far!

Make Dashboard an overlay again, and not a space: System Preferences → Mission Control → disable "Show Dashboard as a space"

Re-enable your Library folder: gdgt.com/question/how-do-you-show-the-library-fold...

Disabling the press-and-hold accented character picker: gdgt.com/question/in-os-x-lion-how-do-you-disable-...

Enabling TRIM support: gdgt.com/question/in-os-x-lion-how-do-you-enable-t...

Restoring three-finger swipe: gdgt.com/question/in-os-x-lion-how-do-you-restore-...

Clean up your Spaces ordering: gdgt.com/question/is-there-a-way-to-reorder-spaces...

Update: just found this link, which has a ton of great tips! tidbits.com/article/12320

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BenBtg 2011-07-23 19:00:18

Clean install is a must.
I had a ton of issues with the upgrade which are all resolved after a fresh install.
Despite what some reviews have suggested it is actually very easy to do and does not require extracting a dmg out of the installer before hand.

1. First back everything up via time machine or use super duper to clone the drive to another.
2. Reboot and hold down cmd 'R' this will bring up the Lion recovery partition
3 Select the disk utility and erase the boot partition
4 Select Reinstall Mac OSX
5 Follow on screen instructions. Your Wifi router will already be configured and the latest version of Lion will download and install.

Enjoy a super responsive and snappy experience with Lion.

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webbernet 2011-07-23 19:46:59

very interesting. so any working copy of Lion has a recovery partition somewhere?

BenBtg 2011-07-24 03:02:11

Yup, it's only about 500mb so doesn't take up took much extra space.

webbernet 2011-07-24 06:19:52

sounds good. I gotta try that out. but so far my upgraded system works fine. what problem did u have b4 the clean install?

ryan 2011-07-24 16:22:03

Yeah, I'll echo webbernet's question: what issues were you having from the upgrade that you aren't having now that you've done a clean install?

BenBtg 2011-07-25 03:16:01

Mainly performance issues. Several apps I relied on suddenly took ages to start. I was constantly getting the beach ball of death particularly with Safari and Chrome which then had to be killed and restarted. I was really beginning to regret doing the upgrade.
Interestingly, space swiping was always really smooth and responsive which suggests its a very low level API with very high CPU priority.

sirris101 2011-07-25 18:08:52

I'm with BenBtg. I feel it's necessary to do a clean install every now and then and figure that if Apple only releases a new OS every 2 years, that makes for the perfect opportunity.

mcdoobie 2011-07-26 15:04:07

I'm sorry for the newbie question, but where can I find the boot partition in Disk utility? I'm scared of erasing more than what I should. Thanks

webbernet 2011-07-26 15:06:30

you won't see it in Disk Utility. but if you hold on to Alt/Option when you boot. you can see it. It's not visible in the system as far as I can tell.

mcdoobie 2011-07-26 15:30:03

So does that mean that i just delete the whole hd (everything is backed up) and that in turn will also erase the 'hidden' boot partition or am i missing something?

webbernet 2011-07-26 15:35:34

just bootup the recovery partition. then erase your main partition from the installer.

BenBtg 2011-07-26 16:57:28

Just to be clear. The boot partition will be the large partition within the hard disk. Only erase that one and leave the small recovery partition alone in case you need it again in the future.

Felipe 2011-07-23 17:06:26

I've been enjoying full screen apps (Safari, iTunes) more than I thought. The ability to 'three-finger swipe' between them is what does it.

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webbernet 2011-07-23 14:57:56

connect to legacy Samba and AFP shares
frankleng.me/2011/07/21/connect-to-a-freenas-samba...

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4lex 2011-07-23 16:09:08

Screen Sharing accounts that are not currently logged in.
Sounds similar to Citrix' Xen technology.
Imagine running FCP X on an iBook!

www.macworld.com/article/161220/2011/07/lion_airdo...

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NewGenNewRev 2011-07-28 02:11:00

I just found a great little trick in Lion.
When in 'Mission Control,' swipe left or right (like you would if you were switching between apps/spaces) and you get a nicer view of the spaces you are switching through, rather than selecting the space itself.
This is great if you have a few apps in one space, and a few in another and cannot differentiate between them.
This feature is pretty great and I hope you like it.
Also, one of my favorite feature (using BetterTouchTools) is making a gesture to switch between tabs in a browser. I'm still deciding on a good gesture, but I'd recommend people trying 'rotate left/right' gesture to switch between tabs. The command to switch between tabs in Safari, by the way, is Shift+Cmd+Left/Right.

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diener 2011-07-23 14:47:35

Re-enable double-tap-to-drag: news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20081959-1/how-to-fix...

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jbella 2011-07-23 16:14:30

I like the small enhancements to spotlight search. When you hit command-space and do a spotlight search, you can switch to the finder view of your spotlight search by selecting "Show all in Finder" at the top of the search results. Also, if you click on any of the results, you get a nice mini quick-look view of that document.

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taxbax 2011-07-25 11:26:25

Here is my Lion writeup www.facebook.com/notes/té-baybute/thoughts-on-lion/10150276922582764

In it, I recommend using these apps to tweak and/or enchance Lion:
Alfred, Fluid, Better Touch Tool, Secrets Prefpane, TotalFinder, and chpwn's Maximizer (chpwn.com/apps/maximizer.html).
Read the article for more information.

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Thanegill 2011-07-28 02:22:19

I've been using the rotate gesture with chrome for a while. I even adopted 3 fingers up to close windows (CMD-W) and 3 finders down to reopen closed tabs (CMD - Shift - T). This has been working out very well for me, the switch to lion took a little while to get setup again with BetterTouchTool, But I think I got it down.

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