This week I reinstalled Snow Leopard in order to return to the uncompromised Macintosh experience Lion left behind. I reviewed all of Lion’s major changes and revealed why the features brought back to the Mac from iOS only manage to confuse the desktop metaphor established in 1984. I am not an enemy of progress, but a friend of consistency. Lion is a transitional OS and the innovations it introduces are inconsistent with the computing paradigms it is not ready to replace. As a long time computer user I am not alone. Switching off new features where possible, and ignoring the rest is a strategy many users take to new operating systems. Lion is not an operating system you can easily ignore, but by knowing where to look there are some features you can switch off.

Multi-Touch Gestures

Most of Lion’s Multi-Touch Gestures can be disabled from the Trackpad preferences pane, but to enable conventional one finger dragging you must also visit the Universal Preference Pane’s hidden Trackpad Options.

Full-Screen Apps

Full-Screen Apps on Lion are a feature you can safely ignore, but you will never be able to overlook the Full-Screen icon tucked away in the upper right hand corner of an ever increasing amount of application windows.

Mission Control

No one is forcing you to enter Mission Control, but the unorganized simplicity of Exposé is lost in Apple latest cat, and the ability to create vertical spaces has been removed from Mac OS X forever.

Mac App Store

As of today the Mac App Store is not the only shop in town, but there might come a day when Apple’s integrated app store can not be ignored.

Launchpad

As long as the Finder still stands LaunchPad is merely an alternative that can be safely ignored.

Resume

Resuming state is a feature you may want in some applications, but not in others. Lion does not give you a GUI control for determining which apps resume and which don’t. You can disable Resume for all applications that use the Lion Resume API by visiting the General Preference Pane and unchecking "restore windows when quitting and re-opening apps." The next time you launch an application that uses Resume its state will be removed from the ~/Library/Saves Application State directory. This option does not effect applications that manage their own state like BBEdit and Firefox.

Another options is to disable Resume for specific apps using the command line.

defaults write com.apple.Safari NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool false

Disables resume for the application Safari. Resume can be reenabled by using the command.

defaults write com.apple.Safari NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool true

Just make sure the global Resume is enabled in the General preference pane first.

Auto Save

As far as I know there is no way to disable Auto Save across all applications that use the feature in Lion. You can disable the automatic locking of documents in the Time Machine preference pane under Options, but that only encourages Auto Save. It does not prevent it.

Versions

Unless a file is locked versions of documents are saved automatically on applications that support the Versions API. Locking a file prevents you from editing it, and creating a duplicate means you now have twice as many files as before. You can not disable Versions in Lion, but you can ignore it by choosing applications that do not support it.

AirDrop

AirDrop is easier to ignore if you don’t have friends in a 30 foot radius trying to send you files. You can also hide AirDrop in the Finder sidebar favorites. Turn off the wifi AirDrop needs to send files, or turn on Mac OS X Firewall with Stealth Mode to block all incoming connections including AirDrop requests.

Mail

Mail is one of the only applications Apple made easily reversible in Lion. In the Mail preferences their is the option to "use classic layout" under the Viewing tab. "Organize by conversation" can also be disabled from the View menu. If you are not a fan of Mail’s new animations these commands will disable them for both send and reply.

defaults write com.apple.Mail DisableSendAnimations -bool YES defaults write com.apple.Mail DisableReplyAnimations -bool YES

iCal

I have already covered how I removed iCal’s leather bound skeuomorphic look in my Skinning iCal article.

Address Book

Similar instructions can be found for Unbinding Lion’s hand sewn Address Book.

Auto-correction

Disabling auto-correction in Lion is as easy as visiting the Language & Text preference pane and unchecking "correct spelling automatically" under the Text tab.

If you find Lion's default behavior to display accented letters after a continued key press annoying, you can revert back to a more standard setting that will enable key repeating.

defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false

Library

The command chflags nohidden ~/Library returns visibility to your Home Library in the Finder.

Dashboard

Unchecking "show Dashboard as a space" in the Mission Control preference pane returns the previous behavior of displaying Dashboard widgets over your desktop.

Launching Animation

Lion’s new millisecond launching animation may bother some, but the command defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool NO will remove it from all applications once they are relaunched.

Disk Utility

Finally if you are like me, and like to see every partition Lion has added to your hard disk, Disk Utility’s Debug Menu is here to help. defaults write com.apple.DiskUtility DUDebugMenuEnabled 1 enables it from the Terminal. While the menu item Show "Every Partition in Disk Utility" reveals Lion’s hidden recovery partition.

Not everyone is stubborn enough to switch back to Snow Leopard, but by turning off Lion’s new features where possible and ignoring the rest not everyone has to.