I’ve been using OS X Lion for about a month now.
I took the plunge when iOS 5 and OS X 10.7.2 came out.
Executive summary
I like it.
If you’re interested in knowing why, read on.
THE GOOD
It turns out that the features I like best are the ones I feared the most!
Versions and auto-resume
I open and/or create hundreds of temporary files a week for my work, and I was terrified at the prospect of auto-resume. I thought every time I’d open Preview or TextEdit, these hundreds of files would fill up the screen and drive me nuts.
Well fear not. It’s fucking fabulous.
It’s no big deal to close open files before quitting an app, and you know what, it’s great to be able to just quit an app knowing it will open the file you are working on the next time you launch the app.
Also, if you close an unsaved file, everything behaves like before. You’re asked to save it, and you can just say no. But if you’re not finished with it, you can just close the app, open the app later, and there is your unsaved file, which you can play with some more, and discard without saving when you’re done.
Close Safari in the middle of writing a blog post (save your draft on your blogging platform first!), and it’s there when you fire up Safari the next time.
As for Versions, the freaky thing is the disappearance of the Save as option, but it makes perfect sense.
Bonus points: when you’re in an app, activate the app Exposé and you’ll see miniatures of all the recent files you’ve opened. Same thing goes with the contextual app menu in the Dock.
Mission Control
Merging Exposé and Spaces actually makes perfect sense.
Mail
Despite the fact that Apple removed the to-do’s, I love the new Mail.app, with it’s two or three column setup, and the ability to see the first few lines of your messages without opening them.
Bonus points: multiple flag colors/categories.
« Natural » scrolling and scroll bars
I have a 2 or 3 year old 24 inch iMac with a standard Mighty Mouse (which I love, despite having to clean its clitoris all the time). Still, I drank the Kool-Aid and bought a Magic Trackpad. I didn’t mind the inverted « natural » scrolling. However, I fucking hated the Trackpad. I have an extended keyboard, and placing the Magic Trackpad to the right of the Keyboard made for some frightful muscle and joint pain.
After about a week of torture, I exchanged it for a Magic Mouse.
I just LOVE it. And it has to be the most beautiful object I own (tied with my iPhone 4).
Back to inverted, « natural » scrolling. For a while, it was hit and miss. I’d choose the right or wrong direction, at random. Until I tricked my brain into thinking in two discrete steps :
1. « Tap » to « grab » the content I want to scroll
2. Drag it up or down
Problem solved. (And it’s become second nature now).
Bonus points: if you’ve ever created a website, you will LOVE the new invisible scrollbars that only show up when you scroll. No more ugly inline scrollbars in web pages, and no more content that moves a few pixels sideways when you jump to a page that needs scroll bars, from a page that doesn’t.
THE BAD
Well, there’s nothing bad really. I just don’t care for the following features.
Launchpad
If you have hundreds of apps like I do, Launchpad is basically useless. I get 8 screens of large icons, ordered haphazardly. There are third-party tools to help you clean up the mess, but I haven’t found the motivation. I’m sure it’s nice if you only have a few apps, but I’ve removed it from my Dock and hot-corners and such.
Full-screen apps
I don’t see the point. And there are a couple of usability problems :
One, I expected the Dock to be minimized but available when you’re in full-screen mode. It isn’t.
And two, in some apps, you lose functionality, or behavior changes completely. In full-screen Mail, new messages are modal (you can’t go and copy stuff from other messages to paste into your new message). In iPhoto, features are added, hidden and/or moved around, and I can’t find what I’m looking for.
Misc.
Safari takes a LONG time to start up (and then it’s fine).
THE UGLY
Lion feels a little wobbly, and I’ve run into a few nasty bugs (which seem somewhat widespread).
I don’t restart my Mac often, but it seems that every time I do, Spotlight rebuilds its index (which bogs down the computer for a while).
The help service seems to go haywire once in a while, gobbling up all available RAM, and bringing the Mac to it’s knees. Have to go into Activity Monitor to kill it.
And speaking of RAM, Lion seems more gluttonous than Snow Leopard.
BOTTOM-LINE
There are many more tweaks and changes, to the Finder (which allows you to sort in column mode, yay, but does it weirdly), to Quick-Look, which is improved in many subtle ways, to Preview, TextEdit, Safari and others.
I gave away the punchline at the top of this post. I like Lion. Hope the bigger bugs will get squashed, and I’m sure I’ll like it even more when I get a new Mac next year (I do so every 3 years it seems) with a faster processor and more RAM.
Now if I could only decide on which Mac to get…