The release of OS X Lion unleashed some cool new features. It also seemed to turn some other cool, established features on their head. Suddenly, features that worked perfectly adequately in Snow Leopard were changed, leaving users first scratching their heads and then frustrated at having to learn new ways of doing things.

Thankfully, it’s possible to revert back to the old way of doing things. And while it’s not always intuitive or easy to do so, there are free third-party solutions available. One of the newest is Indonesian firm TweakNow’s Lion Secrets tweaking tool.

Lion Secrets isn’t the first tool to promise to reverse unwanted tweaks – Lion Tweaks has that honour, but while there’s some overlap in functionality, both can be used to complement each other.

Uncover hidden OS X settings with ease thanks to Lion Secrets

Lion Secrets covers some, but not all of those fixes provided by Lion Tweaks, but it throws in some useful tweaks of its own. These tend to be more generic in nature – you can configure the built-in Screen Capture tool for instance without having to mess around in a Terminal window.

There’s also some additional functionality built-in, such as a rudimentary process explorer and startup manager. Again, both tools are available elsewhere, but it’s nice to have them under one roof.

Most of the tweaks Lion Secrets has can be found under the aptly titled Mac Secrets tab. This is split into six sections: General, Dock, Finder, Mail, Safari and Screen Capture. Unlike Lion Tweaks, some helpful information is provided with each potential setting, allowing you to make a more informed choice about what you want to do.

Lion Secrets also automatically backs up each change you make, allowing you to reverse individual changes should things not go to plan and you can’t remember the original setting. It all adds up to a potentially useful tool for Mac owners, and the fact it’s free is an added bonus too.

Lion Secrets 1.0.2 is available now as a freeware download for Macs running OS X 10.7 (Lion).