Using the familiar pinch and spread gesture in OS X Lion, you can adjust the thumbnail size of desktop wallpaper previews within System Preferences. A spread gesture will increase the thumbnail size, and a pinch gesture will shrink the wallpaper thumbnails.

Try it yourself, just open System Preferences, and from the Desktop control panel use a two-fingered spread, the same you’d use on an iPhone or iPad to zoom into an image or text, or that you’d use in Safari or Preview in Mac OS X to zoom on the content.

The smallest size will show a 5×4 grid, and the largest thumbnails will show 2×2.

Thanks for the tip Jimmy

Ultrasn0w 1.2.5 has been released and it allows for unlocking some iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 models with older modem firmware versions. Compatible baseband is as follows:

• iPhone 4: 01.59.00
• iPhone 3GS: 04.26.08, 05.11.07, 05.13.04, 06.15.00

You can check baseband on the iPhone by tapping on Settings > General > About and looking for “Modem Firmware” near the bottom of the About screen.

If your iPhone 3GS or iPhone 4 has eligible baseband and is already jailbroken, then you can just search Cydia for “ultrasn0w” and download and install the latest version. Reboot the iPhone and you’ll be able to use the new unofficial network. If you’re not sure what to do, follow the instructions below:

How to Unlock iPhone 3GS & iPhone 4 on iOS 5.0.1 with Ultrasn0w

Be sure to confirm baseband firmware before proceeding:

• Jailbreak iOS 5.0.1 with redsn0w 0.9.9b9 and then boot the iPhone tethered
• Open Cydia and search for ultrasn0w, installing the ultrasn0w 1.2.5 package onto the iPhone
• Shut off the iPhone and insert the new SIM card from another carrier
• Boot the iPhone tethered using redsn0w again
• Wait for the iPhone to join the new network

Most iPhones won’t be eligible to use this version of ultrasn0w due to the baseband limitation. Keep in mind you can now buy the iPhone 4S unlocked directly from Apple, they aren’t cheap but you won’t have to bother with jailbreaks, software unlocks, or preserving baseband versions between iOS upgrades, and will always be free to use the iPhone on whatever compatible network you have a SIM card for.

Want to give someone an iOS app as a gift this holiday season? You can gift apps directly from the iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad, without ever touching a computer and without the need for purchasing an iTunes gift card. This makes for a perfect last minute Christmas shopping or birthday present, since you can literally buy someone a present on the car ride over to their house Christmas morning. Gifting apps is very simple:

Gift an iOS App from an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch from the App Store

This process is done directly on the iOS device within the App Store, but it can be repeated in iTunes as well.

• Launch the App Store
• Find the app you want to gift and tap on it
• Scroll down below the screenshots of the app and tap on “Gift This App”, then sign into the iTunes Store
• Tap “Next” on the app summary screen
• Fill in your name, the recipients name, and the recipients email address, as well as a note to attach to the gifted app (note: including several recipients email addresses will buy the app for each person)
• On the purchase summary screen, tap on “Buy Gift” in the lower right corner

The app will immediately be sent to the gift recipient, who receives an email with a link to download the iOS app to their iTunes library.

If you’d rather wrap the app as a physical gift, you can do so with iTunes by choosing to print a redeemable code instead of emailing the app. Gifted apps will appear in your purchase history, so if you or the recipient loses the redemption email, it can easily be retrieved again.

Note that you can not use redeemed credit from iTunes gift cards to purchase gifted apps, and the recipients iPhone, iPod, or iPad must be compatible with the app you are sending, which most are.

The developer betas of Mac OS X 10.7.3 show new evidence of retina display Macs, according to a recent find by MacRumors. The discovery points to some applications “Get Info” dialog box displaying an option to “Open in HIDPI mode”, although checking the box doesn’t appear to do anything yet, and the reference seems to have been removed from the most recent 10.7.3 11D36 build.

HiDPI display modes are roughly double the existing resolutions available to Mac displays, references to these resolutions have been found separately in past versions of OS X Lion. Other evidence of retina Macs are high resolution icons and massive 3200×2000 pixel wallpapers being the default in Mac OS X 10.7.

Currently, no Mac exists with a screen that would qualify for a HIDPI display mode. Some rumors suggest that a MacBook Pro with a 2880×1800 retina display could debut sometime in 2012, and may be the first Mac equipped with such a display.

Go2Shell is a free Finder toolbar add-on that creates a new Terminal window from the current directory of any desktop folder in Mac OS X with a click of a button. This is similar to the services option that can be added to the right-click contextual menu, but Go2Shell is faster due to resting in the Finder toolbar and being accessible with a single click.

• Download Go2Shell free on the Mac App Store

Installation is easy, download Go2Shell from the Mac App Store and then drag Go2Shell into any Finder window toolbar. The app works with OS X Lion and Snow Leopard, although the icon needs updating to fit Lion’s UI. Removing Go2Shell from the toolbar is achieved by holding down the command key and dragging it out.

If you favor iTerm2 or another terminal application other than the OS X default Terminal.app, you can select that as the default by accessing the Go2Shell configuration window. Just type the following at the command line:

open -a Go2Shell --args config

Here you’ll be able to change the terminal application and adjust the command/message that appears anytime Go2Shell is used (default is cd %PATH%; clear; pwd).

This was recommended in our comments instead of the Services option. Outside of being quicker, the other added benefit is Mac OS X 10.6 support, which is lacking with the services menu addition. Snow Leopard users can also follow the drag and drop to print the path approach.

A new developer build of Mac OS X 10.7.3 has been released by Apple as build 11D36. This is the third developer version of OS X 10.7.3 and is available for registered Mac Developers to download through the dev center with no known issues.

Listing no known issues could suggest public availability in the near future. According to MacRumors, the release notes from Apple tells developers to focus on and test app compatibility with iCloud document storage, Address Book, Mail, iCal, Spotlight, and Safari, which may also indicate the extent of the next OS X system update.

The last public software update for Mac OS X Lion was 10.7.2, released in October.

Need to resize a ton of pictures? Instead of downloading a third party application or using Preview, you can use Automator to handle the entire operation, even renaming the images to indicate they have been resized. Automator is included in every OS X installation’s /Applications/ folder and is simple to use for repetitive tasks like this.

How to create an Automator application that will resize a group of pictures:

• Launch Automator and select to create a new Application
• From the left side Library menu, click on “Files & Folders” then double-click on “Ask for Finder Items”
• Now on the right side set the “Ask for Finder Items” choice to ‘Start at’ the Desktop and then click the checkbox next to “Allow Multiple Selection”
• Next, from the same Files & Folders menu, find and double-click on “Copy Finder Items”
• From the right-side pull-down menu alongside “To” choose “Other” and create a new folder called “Resized”
• Optional: Again from the library, double-click on “Rename Finder Items” to add that action as well
• Optional: From the pull-down menu choose “Add Text” and in the box below add “-resized” to appear after the file name
• Now click on “Photos” from the left side Library menu, then double-click on “Scale Images”, and select the resized pixel width of images
• Run the workflow to test it, otherwise choose “Save” to create an application that allows for drag & drop resizing of groups of images

If you want the resized images to appear in the same location as the origin folder, choose “Variable” and “Path” as the ‘To’ folder in “Copy Finder Items”, if you choose this option you should be sure that you add the Rename action so that you don’t accidentally overwrite any existing files.

Once the Automator workflow has been saved as an application, you can keep the app on your desktop or Dock and then drag and drop pictures onto it to resize automatically.

Don’t like Automator? You can resize groups of images manually in Preview as mentioned before, or tweak and resize images from the command line tool sips.

If you have a lot of app windows open in Mission Control, hover over a group of windows and use a two finger swipe upwards to expand and zoom on just those windows. This makes easier to differentiate windows and select one that may be obscured behind others in the default view.

Using a defaults write command you can also set this zoom feature to show the full size of windows in Mission Control.

Firefox 9 has just been released for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. The latest version brings some significant boosts to javascript performance, some theme fixes, and a variety of other under-the-hood enhancements. Probably the most noticeable addition will be for OS X Lion users though, with the addition of two-fingered swipe gesture navigation.

Download Firefox 9

• Mac OS X
• Windows
• Linux

For those with Mac OS X Lion and a trackpad or Magic Mouse, the new two-finger gestures are:

• Swipe left to go forward a page
• Swipe right to go back a page

These are the same gestures that exist in Chrome, although Firefox is missing the hovering arrow which tells you the direction of your swipe.

The official “what’s new” release notes for Firefox 9 are:

• Added Type Inference, significantly improving JavaScript performance
• Improved theme integration for Mac OS X Lion
• Added two finger swipe navigation for Mac OS X Lion
• Added support for querying Do Not Track status via JavaScript
• Added support for CSS font-stretch
• Improved support for text-overflow
• Improved standards support for HTML5, MathML, and CSS
• Fixed several stability issues

Firefox 9 still does not include native Full Screen support for Lion, and although you can enter its own fullscreen mode with Command-Shift-F, it’s not as fluid and the arrow buttons aren’t there for those who are keystroke shy. Also missing is embedded PDF support, forcing you to download and open PDF’s with Preview. With how fast Firefox is pushing out releases, you’d think they would bring it up to par with the expectations of a Lion app already, but maybe some of these features will come in version 10. All in all these are relatively minor complaints though, and if you use Firefox as your web browser of choice, it’s very much a worthwhile update for the speed and javascript improvements alone.

Growl is a popular notification system for Mac OS X that throws up those fading pop-up windows in the upper right corner of the screen. It’s a nice add on to OS X, and tons of other applications use Growl as their notification system.

Then Mac OS X 10.7 came out, and Growl went from being open source to closed, and now it costs $2 to get the newest features in addition to Lion compatibility. Right? Wrong. Growl Fork, as the name implies, is a fork of Growl from the last open sourced version, and best of all, it includes Mac OS X Lion compatibility. If you don’t need the newer features in the official version and just want compatibility with Lion and your apps to continue receiving notifications, Growl Fork works just fine.

• You can download Growl Fork from here for free

Install Growl Fork and it’ll appear in your System Preferences as usual, ready for configuration and with all of the settings that you had before in Snow Leopard. Again, it doesn’t have the newest features from the newest App Store version, but it works great and is completely free.

Thanks for sending this in Jacob