Mac OS X Lion is finally here, and now that your bank account is $29.99 lighter, you may be feeling apprehensive about this strange new world you find yourself immersed in. If you want to keep up to date running Lion while staying close to the loving bosom of Snow Leopard, here are some tips for making it happen.

Apple finally uncaged Mac OS X Lion this week, marking the first time a major operating system update could be purchased exclusively for download on the Mac App Store at a wallet-friendly price of only $29.99. Now that you’ve downloaded the roughly 4GB installer, done the deed and spent some time getting acquainted with the big cat, you might be feeling some separation anxiety for the old and familiar -- namely, Mac OS X Snow Leopard.

Rather than firing up Time Machine to reverse course back to the loving arms of Snow Leopard, here are a few ways you can make OS X Lion behave a little bit more like the snowy feline you’ve lived with for almost two years.

Which Way Am I Scrolling Here?

Perhaps the biggest change for longtime Mac users is Lion’s new way of scrolling. By now you may have noticed that your trackpad or mouse scroll wheel isn’t doing things the way you’re used to -- in fact, it’s doing quite the opposite. That’s because Apple has changed the behavior to match iOS. Or as they put it: “When you scroll or swipe in Lion, content now moves in the same direction as your finger.”

So what is a veteran Mac user to do? Thankfully, Apple was smart enough to include a setting in System Preferences for switching back to the pre-Lion scrolling behavior, although you may want to start cozying up to the concept now -- it’s the default behavior for Lion, which means Apple will someday make that friendly preference setting go swim with the fishes. (Snow Leopard users, you also can start getting used to it now by installing the free Scroll Reverser hack from developer Nick Moore.)

Reclaim Your Home Library Folder

In an effort to keep you out of trouble, Apple has decided to make the Library folder in your Home directory invisible. Don’t worry -- the folder still exists, and your favorite software will still be able to access it. As luck would have it, you can too.

To navigate to the hidden Library folder from the Finder, enter Command-Shift-G and enter “~/Library” at the “Go to the folder” sheet that appears (without quotes, of course). If you’d like to go back to the Snow Leopard functionality with the Library folder always visible, launch Terminal and type “chflags nohidden ~/Library” (still no quotes) and hit Return. Hello, Home Library folder… nice to see you again.

Finder Preferences To Get Things Back

Since the dawn of the original Macintosh in 1984, longtime users have enjoyed easy access to mounted hard drives right from the Finder’s Desktop. With the introduction of Mac OS X, this became an option in the Finder Preferences, particularly for connected servers or removable disks such as CDs, DVDs or classic iPods. If you have your Desktop set up to display these volumes, you might be surprised to find them gone after OS X Lion is installed.

Fear not, the solution is as simple as it was in Snow Leopard: Go to Finder > Preferences and from the General tab, check the volumes you want to show on the Desktop once more. But wait, don’t close that window quite yet -- there’s more!

OS X Lion introduces a new view called “All My Files” whenever you open a new Finder window instead of the Home directory we’re all familiar with. Since you’re already in the General tab, change the “New Finder windows open” popup back to your Home folder, which is usually your username.

Finally, since Apple has also removed mounted volumes from the Finder sidebar as well, you can get things back to normal while you’re still in Finder Preferences. Click the Sidebar tab, check the items you want to appear, ‘nuff said. We’re done here!

Dual Boot: Best of Both Worlds

If you haven’t installed Lion yet, you can have your cake and eat it too, without having to give up that 10.6 Snow Leopard goodness. One option for users who want to hang onto the past a bit longer while dipping a toe into the Lion pool is to create a separate partition on your hard drive, allowing you to keep your existing Snow Leopard installation exactly as it currently is.

A quick Google search will turn up the exact steps for doing this (such as this dual-boot how-to from OSXDaily.com), but keep in mind there are some disadvantages as well. You’ll have to reinstall the apps you can’t live without in Lion -- not a huge problem for Mac App Store purchases (unless you have metered internet), but for non-MAS apps, there could be issues.

For example, software like the Adobe Creative Suite is limited to two activations -- if you’re already using both of them, you’ll have to deactivate one to use them in both Snow Leopard and Lion. You might also use more hard drive space, assuming you store a lot of files in services such as Dropbox that will sync cloud-based files to every computer you’re logged into.

With any luck, the transition to OS X Lion won’t be any more of a hardship than the one we all survived going from Leopard to Snow Leopard -- and the long-term benefits (and tons of tasty new features!) certainly outweigh the brief learning curve.

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