If you’re an OS X Lion user, you might be looking into different ways to adjust the system features to your own needs accordingly. Lion Tweaks is a new free tool that changes specific settings in Lion to make it more visually-appealing, or maybe just work better for you.
Apple puts an incredible amount of work into engineering its user experience, perhaps more than any other company which we’ve known. While most users won’t mind Apple’s pre-configured choices, specific users might want to revive the 2D Dock found on old version of Mac OS X, while others might just not be fans of the new "leather" look now present in iCal and Address Book, preferring the standard metal look instead. For all these users, there’s Lion Tweaks, which includes 14 individual settings that can be adjusted.
As you can tell from the image above, the user interface is simple, requiring users to simply select whether they want a specific feature to be on or off. Sadly, there’s no way to visualize which settings are already turned on and which aren’t. More importantly, there isn’t a way to revert all the settings to their original state, making it harder to diagnose problems in case they arise.
Turning most tweaks on and off is actually very simple, requiring users to simply restart the affected application once the tweak has been applied. If the tweak involves Finder, you can easily restart it by pressing Option + Command + Esc on your keyboard, selecting "Finder" and then choosing "Restart". A minority of tweaks, namely those that involve changing the style of apps, requires quick installation which comes with its own risks, but no problems have arisen during our testing.
Most of these settings could all be applied manually by editing certain system text files, although this tool definitely makes the job a whole lot easier. If you’re looking into spicing up OS X Lion, or perhaps get rid of some of its changes you might have found annoying, Lion Tweaks is a must-have tool.
Lion Tweaks is available completely free of charge from its official website.
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