How to make OS X Snow Leopard look and feel like Lion

To be honest, I don't intend on upgrading to Lion until it works seamlessly with my current setup. From what I can tell for now, with a visit to roaringapps.com, it seems like there quite a few kinks to iron out with third party apps. I'm sure many things work, but why take the chance when most of the 250 new things seem to be UI elements and other "frivolous things". Don't get me wrong, I think Lion is cool, but there's nothing exceptional it has to offer when I compare it with Snow Leopard, which is probably why Apple decided on the $29.99 price tag (although I reckon that they could have priced it at $99.99, and I'm sure people would have still bought it...). So, I figured, why not make my Snow Leopard install look a little like Lion, while I wait for things to get a little more stable. As it turns out, it's not too hard to put some lion skin on a leopard for some temporary coolness.



Step 1: Skin the UI and Grab the Wallpapers

To make the the Leopard's skin look like a Lion, all you need to do is grab a copy of ThemePark, and install a Lion theme (like this one) from deviant art. This will change the default widgets (buttons, progress bars, dropdown menus etc. to make it more lion like). One thing you'll notice though is that the scrollbars may look a little out of place, since they can't really be "hidden".

Also, you can find a ton of OS X lion wallpapers on the net. Grab one that you like, and set it as your wallpaper, if you really want to copy the default look of Lion.

Step 2: Tweak the apps

Apple Mail
One of the newly touted features in Apple Mail is the (dare I say "Outlook" like) column on the left hand side. You can somewhat emulate this using Dane Harnett's Widemail plugin.

Also, you can turn on message threading (View > Organize by thread) which also groups together messages that have the same subject lines, although not quite as elegantly as the new mail.

Finally, if you want something that looks a little more like the new mail and you tend to mainly use IMAP, you may want to give Sparrow a try.


Step 3: Mouse/Multitouch and Keyboard Settings
Who says Snow Leopard can't have the Multitouch pizzazz of Lion? Just grab BetterTouchTool and you'll find that it's powerful enough to emulate quite a few features like going back and forth in Safari, activating Expose or Spaces and much more (you can even do things like Play/Pause!). Yes, there is quite a bit of configuration to do, but just follow Apple's footsteps on the actions they've mapped to certain gestures and I'm sure you'll have most of the multitouch features down in no time. As an added bonus, you can also turn on Windows Snap like features, which is quite awesome IMHO.

Also, one of the "new" (if not cool) things about Lion is that up is down, and down is up, when it comes to scrolling, when you compare it to the usual way of scrolling anyway. You can emulate this using Scroll Reverser.  While this works great with the iPhone and iPad because there is a "direct relationship" between the content and your finger, I don't think it works all too well when you're using a mouse/trackpad mainly because most people have associated scrolling with scrollbars. When you scroll down, the content goes up. But since Apple has hidden the scrollbars in Lion, it's probably easier to switch your normal ways. I haven't figured out how to make them disappear on Snow Leopard though, so you can only switch scroll directions for now. However, by the looks of it Google Chrome does seem to have this trick up it's sleeve, because when I try to use the new blogger UI, it show me scroll bars that look much like Lion's. Interesting.

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3 things to give your Mac a Tune-up

One of the great things I like about having Macs is the fact that you rarely have to worry as much about system slowdowns as long as you have adequate RAM and enough processing power to do what you need.  But sometimes it does help to reclaim some hard drive space, delete some system files and tweak you system settings to make you Mac feel like new.  Here are somethings you can do to give your Mac a quick tune-up.

Note: While many people will probably be switching to OS X Lion right now, I for one am not going to be switching for at least a few more months, mainly because I'm absolutely positive that a lot of application makers are still scrambling to make their apps compatible with lion. And of course, if you do an upgrade, you'll still be left with some cruft from the older system, so these tips may still be helpful (provided the apps below are compatible with Lion ;)

Delete Unused Apps with AppCleaner

While you can easily delete unused apps by dragging the apps from your applications folder to the trash, the apps often leave behind preference files and other system files all around your system. To get rid of these files, you're better off using an app called AppCleaner, which seems to be a free version of AppZapper that does the job quite well. Especially if you tend to install a lot of apps, this should help you reclaim some valuable disk space.

Delete Unused Logs and Change System Preferences To Your Liking with Onyx

While your Mac does its job, it often stores a lot of files and logs that may be helpful for reporting and so on. Such logs may take up valuable space. Furthermore, the cached information on your mac's system cache as well as the permissions for the files on your mac may be out of date, so it may be helpful to run a tool called Onyx to sort things out. Finally, I think that it's a good idea to make sure that the permissions and such are all fine on your hard drive so the necessary files can be accessed by your system.

Organize Your Files with the terminal

One of the great things about a new computer that it's not as cluttered. It's sort of like the "tabula rasa", if you will. If you're anything like me, then chances are that within a few days of use, you'll have files all over the place, but also will have customized a ton of settings. If you reinstall from scratch, you'll be losing all these settings, so it's best to just reorganize your files instead.

While you could just drag and drop things, I find that the terminal is a much more powerful tool (located in Applications > Terminal) that allows you to do things like wildcard moves and other fun stuff.

For example, let's say that I have to move all the PDF's from my download folder that are work related to my documents folder. I could command click each of these PDF's individually, and drag and drop them. Except, with the terminal, there's an easier command:

mv Downloads/WORK*.pdf Documents/Work/

Which essentially says move (that's the mv) anything from the downloads folder that starts with WORK has whatever (that's the *), and ends with a pdf to the documents/Work folder. You'll need to do some more reading on how to use these commands if you're not sure about them, but once you master these, you'll find that dragging and dropping is just a big pain. Here's a cool command line tutorial to get you started.

You may also find it rather helpful to search for those large files on your hard drive and delete them to reclaim some hard drive space.


And this is all I usually use on a regular basis. I don't every defrag my mac, because I've never found the need to (and also because I'm on a SSD...), and, of course, I don't use any fancy registry cleaners because macs don't have a registry.

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Make your caps lock key do something useful

I think that I use the the capslock key about 3 times a year - accidently that is. Having it on my keyboard all the time is just taking up valuable home-row space that can be used for something else. I'm certainly not the first to propose the idea of repurposing the key for a better use, but after seeing Google's chromebook notebook without a caps lock key (well, without a capslock key by default it seems) really motivated me to do something similar.

Here's how you can remap that key to something more useful on a Mac:

1. Click the Apple icon on the menubar at the top left hand side of your screen
2. System Preferences
3. Click the Keyboard icon
4. Modifier Keys...
5. Map the capslock key to something more useful using the dropdown menu!

On Windows, follow the instructions here: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/map-any-key-to-any-key-on-windows-xp-vista/

If you're using GNU/Linux, your best bet would probably be: http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2007/08/02/remapping-the-caps-lock-key/

Now that you've remapped that key to something else, you have no excuse to "accidentally use it" anymore!

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Enable "Instant Search" like behaviour for websites in Google Chrome

When I was snooping around under the hood of chrome, I noticed this cool setting that pretty much enables "instant" for websites.

That's right. Instead of typing in the whole URL, all you need to is type in a few letters of the URL and chrome will automatically load the website. This works amazingly well (although there are a few times when it loads the wrong website, and may not be great when you're doing demos), and does a great job of loading websites even before you press the enter button.

To enable this, all you need to do is click on the wrench icon, and click preferences.

Under, search, you need to Enable Instant for searching and browsing.

That's it.

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Switch to 2G mode on your Samsung Galaxy S/Captivate/Vibrant

So apart from switching to HSDPA to 3G mode, you can actually go another step down to EDGE (or 2G) only mode on your Samsung Galaxy S phone.

Unlike other phones, however, the switch to 2G mode is somewhat sneaky on Samsung's phone, and I decided to make a note about it here.

To switch to 2G (well 2.5G theoretically) only mode for data do the following:

1. Press Menu Button on home screen
2. Settings
3. Wireless and Network
4. Mobile Networks
5. Network Mode
6. Choose GSM Only (i.e. only use Edge Speeds... without using HSPA (3G)).

This tweak will slow down your data connection a lot (making web browsing almost useless, and you can forget about using that flash player on the phone), but you may be able to almost double the standby battery life of your phone even when auto-sync is turned on.

Hope this helps the Galaxy S users out there!

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Quick Tip: Creating Equations faster in Microsoft Word

While Microsoft Word wasn't really built to write equations (if you really want to do equations, look up LaTeX (not to be confused with latex)), recent editions of Word for windows have added features from LaTeX to help write up equations more easily.

If you're on Windows, and have Word 2007 or 2010, then try this:
Press Alt and = to quickly place an equation the document.

Then start typing your equations. If you have a greek letter to put in there type it like this: \alpha or \beta or \gamma. Also, you can create fractions by simply putting in equations in the right brackets like (\alpha + \beta)/(\gamma).

Also you can use ^ to do a superscript, like x^2 to make x². To do a subscript use _ like x_0 to make x₀.

As far as I know, there's no way of making this work as well on Microsoft Word for mac, but if someone has any tips on how to do this, I'm all ears.

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Make your android phone's battery life better!

While many iPhone users will brag that their phone has better life than (most) android devices, if you own a 'droid phone, you'll agree that there is some truth to the statement. Android has a lot of features that, when enabled, will eat up your battery life quickly. A quick search on the web will lead you to a lot of articles (like the one from the HowtoGeek for example) that will tell you how you can get more battery life. Some of these tips are good to know but I've found that they do very little to actually save your battery.

Here's what probably won't help you much:

• Switching to a black background for your main app screen - Doesn't help much unless of course you plan on staring only at the app screen all day. Turning off live wallpapers may actually help (very little though), as it'll prevent the unnecessary CPU usage required to run them.
• Task killers - This is probably if you have a ton of apps running and want to kill them all once in a while, but running them too often, or having them set to autokill may probably not help much. YMMV on this one, but you most probably won't be seeing a ton of increase in the battery life.
• Turning off your phone - This tip actually works, but you probably won't be able to make any phone calls :(

Here's what most likely will have some effect (I've tested this mostly on the Samsung Captivate -- may be this guide should be called How to improve battery life on the "Samsung Captivate", but I'm sure there are ways of doing the same on other phones as well):

• Switching to 3G only instead of HSDPA or LTE or 4G etc.. Many phones have the feature to disable HSPDA or 4G and run purely on 3G only. Here's how you can do this for the Samsung Galaxy S/Captivate/Vibrant etc.. The downside to this is, of course, the fact that you probably won't be getting the fast access to data that your phone is capable off. On the other hand you'll certainly get a better battery life. As an added bonus, you can also simply disable data altogether (a quick google search for your phone should tell you how) if you know for sure that you're not going to need it. In the case of my phone, it's simply doing a long press on the power button and disabling data. For example, if you're going in an hour long meeting, or about to begin an hour long phone call, just turn of the data before you do so. You'll still get texts and such, but your email won't be synced, and you obviously won't be able to browse the net.
• Turn off stuff that you don't need (Bluetooth, GPS, Wi-fi etc.) as  - Obvious tip here, but I do admit that I'm sometimes guilty of keeping bluetooth/wifi/GPS on even after I've finished using it. This is more of a habit thing really, so I'm not too big on this tip. I do turn off stuff that I don't need though, but I'm sure my phone is smart enough not to use the GPS radio when I clearly don't need it. Also, I should probably add that turning off your phone, or at least putting it in airplane mode when you're in the subway/airplane/boat etc.would certainly help as well. Just sayin'
• Turning off the wireless radio when your screen is off - Apps like JuiceDefender or Green Energy out there will do just this. They usually work on a schedule basis, where the phone turns on every x minutes to sync any email, and then will only turn on if your screen is on. Having this app running in the background will have some energy cost, but you'll save a lot by keeping your data radio disabled for 80% of the day (if you sync every 1 in five minutes).
• Turn off auto sync for push email. This definitely works because your data radio doesn't ping the mail server every 2 minutes to keep the push connection alive. However, the battery savings most definitely are not worth it considering the fact that you may think that you have no new email (but in reality you just forgot to refresh the email manually) and miss a lot of important email. This has happened to me on several occasions, since I've gotten used to the BlackBerry delivering all the mail to me right when it arrives.
• If you're like me and don't want to turn off auto sync: Don't use polling, but use push email instead (particularly if you have a Gmail account) as much as possible - Interestingly enough, I've found in my completely random and unscientific tests that if you use the default email client that comes in your phone and most likely support polling intervals of 5 mins, 10 minutes etc. that if you have it set to something like 10 minutes even, you will use about the same battery as using push email that probably gets any new email within a minute. Particularly, if you have something like 5 emails being polled even at the times of something like 30 minutes, then you may even experience a larger battery drain. Of course, you need to check your exchange account or something then you'll have to use an app that has exchange support, but may not have push. Also, people have commented that if you use the Gmail app for all your Gmail accounts, it'll maintain only 1 connection with the server even if you have several accounts, thus saving battery life. Not too sure about that one though.
• Use Wireless-Fidelity instead of 3G - If you know you're in a wi-fi spot (at work or home or something) and have a relatively good connection, then turn on your wifi radio instead of keeping data on. Wi-fi is a much shorter range communication protocol, and as such requires less energy to process, so you may save up to 25% by not using 3G/Data (that number is just a rough guesstimate though... this is clearly not AnandTech where benchmarks are done with up to the millisecond results). Of course, you should turn off wireless when you're outside a Wi-Fi zone, because you're phone will probably die searching for a wi-fi connection. If you have an app like JuiceDefender ultimate then such apps will automatically switch to wifi for you when there is a connection available. Also, you may want to set you Wi-fi sleep policy to never (google should help with this)
• Lower the haptic feedback - If you have that motor buzzing a lot every time you type a letter, then you're definitely going to kill your battery writing up a blog post as long as this one. I do like the haptic feedback though, but I keep it down to the lowest level so that I can still feel it, but not a lot. If you're phone comes with Swype, then you should probably use that too... doesn't save battery life or anything, but at least it looks cool ;)
• Underclock/Undervolt your processor - If you're savvy enough (or have a lot of time on your hands), or just really need the battery life, you should look into this. The XDA forums will most likely have ~847 articles describing how you can do this. Doing so often requires you to install a custom rom and do a whole bunch of other things, but the process is usually documented quite well. I personally haven't bothered to get into this business because I don't really want to invest a lot of time into this just for getting an extra hour or so of battery life.

Bonus: If your phone has an AMOLED display then try out ScreenFilter. It'll reduce the brightness of your screen more so than the lowest brightness setting on your screen, saving some battery life. Also, if you're reading and replying to emails in the middle of the night, you won't be blinded by your flashlight like cell screen.

Ultimately though, although it doesn't seem like it, we all have to accept the fact that battery technology has still come a long way to power the computers/radios in our pocket. Transporting that data through the air isn't cheap when it comes to energy costs (or monetary costs for that matter). Even though you probably won't be able to last a week without recharging, you'll most likely make it through the day, which is probably good enough for most people, myself included.

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