Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Initial MacOS X 10.7 Lion Notes

In System Preferences:
  • To change the mouse scrolling behavior to how it use to behave in prior versions, uncheck "Move content in the direction of finger movement..." in the Mouse panel.  It might be worth leaving it checked if using a track pad or Magic Mouse.
  • To always show scroll bars, change the "Show scroll bars" options in the General panel.  Unfortunately, there isn't a way to add scroll arrows.
In order to show harddrive/directory information (number of items and free disk space) in the Finder, toggle on "Show Status Bar" under the View menu.

The default location which Finder windows opens is now "All My Files".  To change it, look under the Finder preferences, and change the location listed under "New Finder windows show" in the General tab.  I have mine set to Applications, although I used to have it set to my home directory.

To install Java, launch any Java application from the Finder.  For example, Java Preferences under Applications/Utilities.

There are a bunch of new high quality voices in multiple languages when customizing the System Voice in the Speech System Preference panel.  They will auto download if selected and are quite large.  The foreign languages seem to be all high quality.  For U.S. English, Jill and Tom are the high quality ones.

After installing, it takes a long time (and lots of churning of the hard drive) to rebuild the Spotlight database.