Do you miss the way Mail used to look? Mail.app received a pretty significant makeover in Mac OS X Lion, but if you’re not a fan of the revised layout, you can easily revert back to the classic Mail appearances original UI:

• Open Mail and Preferences
• Click on “Viewing” tab and choose “Use classic layout”

That’s it! You’re back to the way Mail looked in Snow Leopard, which keeps the message list on top of the mail message.

Thanks to Jim for sending this in!

You can do just about anything in an Apple Store and the employees don’t seem to mind. To prove this point, a comedian set about pushing the limits of the Apple Stores unspoken “anything goes” policy, hosting a date, ordering a pizza, dressing as Darth Vader, and finally, bringing a goat into the store. Pretty stupid video but it’s an entertaining find from MacRumors.

Lynx is a text based command line web browser, it’s relatively popular within unix communities but it also has a variety of general uses too; it’s great if you want to discretely browse the web and read articles at work or school, and developers use lynx frequently to test accessibility and to roughly estimate how spiders or crawlers view a website. Because it only loads text and avoids javascript and images, it’s also lightning fast.

Anyway, after updating to Lion I discovered my previous installation of lynx was not functioning. Thankfully it’s very easy to install a working version with the help of MacPorts.
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For those of you who aren’t running Mac OS X Lion yet, Apple has released a supplemental update to OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard that includes a variety of bug fixes for the OS and for moving to 10.7 Lion. Here are the brief release notes:

The Mac OS X 10.6.8 Supplemental Update is recommended for all users running Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.8 and resolves issues with:

* Transferring personal data, settings, and compatible applications from a Mac running Mac OS X Snow Leopard to a new Mac running Mac OS X Lion

* Certain network printers that pause print jobs immediately and fail to complete

* System audio that stops working when using HDMI or optical audio out

You can get download the newest version through Software Update or from Apple’s website

iOS 4.3.5 has been released by Apple, the update includes a fix for a security vulnerability pertaining to certificate validations and is recommended for all iOS users – unless of course you rely on a jailbreak. iOS 4.3.5 is build 8L1 and supports iPhone 4 GSM, iPhone 3GS, iPad, iPad 2, iPod touch 3rd and 4th gen, a separate 4.2.10 release is available for iPhone 4 CDMA users.

You can get the latest iOS 4.3.5 update directly from software update within iTunes, or by downloading the firmware directly from Apple at the links below.
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Mac OS X Lion brings a subtle new window animation, it’s so subtle that many people probably won’t even notice it, but it displays any time a new window is created. It’s better seen than described (the above screenshot only captures so much), but basically the new window grows to full sized version out of a microscopic version of itself, seemingly appearing out of nowhere.

It all happens very quickly, but like everything else that gets changed with a new version of an OS, some people don’t lik it, and other users are noting that it makes Lion feel slower than Snow Leopard – considering it lasts only a millisecond I disagree, but I can understand both concerns so we’ll go ahead and show you how to disable it.

Disabling the New Window Animation in OS X 10.7 Lion

You’ll need to use the Terminal and a defaults write command to disable this.

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool NO

You’ll have to relaunch any currently running apps to have the changes take effect. If you want the new Lion window animation back, that’s easy too:
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Mac OS X 10.7 includes many new high quality voices for it’s text-to-speech abilities, they’re in a wide variety of languages and accents and are probably some of the best computer rendered voices out there. We got a sneak peak at these months ago, but now they’re accessible for everyone to add to Lion. But guess what? They’re not installed by default! Thankfully that’s easy to change.
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MacPorts 2.0 has been released, the new version includes full OS X 10.7 compatibility. For those who are unfamiliar, MacPorts is a popular package management utility used to easily install thousands of open-source applications and utilities for the command line, X11, and even some Aqua apps. Because MacPorts handles the retrieval and building of dependencies in addition to the bundle you are looking for, it’s easier than finding and compiling a variety of packages yourself.

To install MacPorts 2, you will also need to have downloaded XCode 4.1, which is now a free download from the Mac App Store for OS X Lion users.

Get MacPorts 2.0

You can read the 2.0 update page or just download the DMG directly. If you already have MacPorts installed you can just run the selfupdate command:
sudo port selfupdate
This will update whatever version you are currently running to 2.0.

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Apple has released a new iPad 2 commercial that follows closely in the same theme set by prior iPad 2 ads. The ad emphasizes the user and how they fit into the rapidly changing post-PC world that Apple has pioneered:

“We’ll never stop sharing our memories, or getting lost in a good book… We’ll always cook dinner and cheer for our favorite team… We’ll still go to meetings, make home movies, and learn new things… But how we do all this will never be the same.”

New Apple commercials seem to favor starting their airtime on Sunday nights and this one is no different. Be sure to note the minor reference to OS X Lion, courtesy of the Alphabet Fun app:
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The weekend is here, and there are quite a few people who haven’t installed Mac OS X Lion yet. Why wait? Now’s as good a time as any, so head over to the App Store and download Lion, and check out some of our recent OS X 10.7 info:

OS X Lion Upgrade and Installation Info

• Recommended steps when upgrading to OS X Lion – start here, but in summary you should check for system compatibility, backup your Mac, and then upgrade
• Install OS X Lion on more than one Mac – download Lion once and copy it to your other personal Macs, this is perfectly acceptable thanks to Lion’s generous personal licensing agreement
• Make an OS X Lion USB install drive – With an external USB drive you can perform a clean install or just upgrade with any compatible Mac. You can make a DVD too if that is your preference
• Check app compatibility with OS X Lion – PPC apps need not apply, here’s how to check your applications folder for any old apps that won’t work

Once you’re all up and running with the latest and greatest version of Mac OS X, don’t miss out on some general tricks and troubleshooting tips:
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