At first glance it didn't seem like it had anything truly compelling (to me) to offer. A few of the features, mainly APIs, sound promising, but the whole "250 New Features" proclamation, like with previous updates is mostly a yawn-fest. But I think I can grow to like it, since I do like a lot of the cleanup they've done to progress bars, default buttons and the like. I especially like being able to resize windows from any side like MS has had for years.

I've installed Lion onto a spare HD and will be using it for testing, it's not ready for use on my boot drive, mainly because of third party app support.

While I dislike the default threaded (conversation) view in Mail, I do like the ability to instantly view "related" messages, even when you're not currently in threaded mode.

Here are some weak points:

Launcher app. Really, who cares? All apps at once? No thanks.

Mail's (default) conversation view is set on a per-folder basis, but there's no way to turn it off for all folders at once. You can select all folders and turn it off and it will appear to be turned off, but as soon as you click back to a single folder, it's ON again. You have to turn it off one folder at a time. This is going to take a LONG time (for me).

Auto-hiding scroll bars. How can you tell whether or not you should scroll up or down to reveal more content in a list? Sometimes it's easy, other times it's not. You certainly have no way of knowing where you are until you start to scroll. I've disabled the default in favor of always showing scroll bars (the old behavior).

Dashboard now has it's own solid background. Great, now when you need to reference something visible in another window on your desktop, you can't. Big reduction in usability.

While screen resolutions are getting higher (denser), someone at Apple decides to make GUI elements smaller. Smaller window controls on the top left not welcomed.

The default to flip pages which is also the default for BACK and FORWARD in the browser, uses two fingers on the trackpad. This is the same two fingers used for vertical and horizontal scrolling. Far too easy to inadvertently go back a page while trying to scroll the view. Had to disable this. I swear no one at Apple tests this stuff, just like magnification in certain apps with pinch - just not useful and a complete PITA.

The Finder... Wow, what a POS. Glad I don't use it and instead use PathFinder. If there was a way to step backwards while trying to go forwards, this is it. Reversed the side bar for no apparent reason and there's no way (that I can tell) to reverse it back. File grouping is annoying as hell with no rhyme nor reason for the order in which things are listed. Much much more...

Sidebar icons have lost all their color and contrast. Many windows are now starting to look amazingly bland, including the Finder's where color was a great cue to selecting icons.

Deleting an application that was already present on an existing system when updating the OS. Front Row is removed from your system when updating to Lion. I'm fine with Apple not including it in Lion, but I'm not fine with them removing an existing app. Nothing was mentioned in the install process about this, not even during the final bit about "incompatible applications."

The reason I'm not installing Lion onto my main boot drive is due to incompatibility with certain third party applications I rely on. Three right off the top of my head:

Glimmerblocker - doesn't work and the Lion installer actually mentions it at the end.

24U Appearance OSAX plugins for AppleScript - I absolutely need this day-to-day as part of a few Automator/AppleScript bundles I've created to help with certain business tasks.

1Password - I can't stand their new browser plugin. It may look flashy, but it suffers tremendously in usability and loses a number of features. The application itself loses a lot of browser integration features in this update with no set date for updates. IMO, stabilize the existing version first and then worry about new versions, making them optional installs. I rely on this to log in to a ton of sites and it's just cumbersome in Lion - including not working at all for some sites nor supporting HTTP Auth requests right now.

I'm curious to see how this goes over with more novice users. For now I don't plan to use it, but I won't knock Apple for bringing it over. They may very well be seeing some new to computer users starting with an iPad, then moving to a full blown Mac later. The Launcher seems to be an attempt to smooth that transition, and avoid putting users into the filesystem to find applications. I noticed mine brought in apps from my Downloads folder, my user Applications folder, and several other locations outside the standard /Applications location. Many novice users never caught on to the "proper" way to install Applications (via drag and drop). While I knew OS X would allow apps to run out of a disk image, I only discovered it would auto remount the dmg if needed when I noticed someone who didn't know better running several apps that way.


This changes based on input device too. A system with just a touchpad will by default hide them, just as an iPad/iPhone/Android device does. A system with a mouse will show them by default. And on a laptop with a touchpad, they will unhide if a mouse is attached, and hide again if the mouse is unplugged.


System Preferences - Mission Control - Show Dashboard as a space


iTunes seemed to start this trend, and iPhoto 11 even removed the color in the recent patch. Very strange, considering other apps are going the other direction, like the Address Book and iCal. No idea what the thinking is here.


I was also sad to see Front Row go, and for now I'm holding off on upgrading the Mini due to this. My only guess here is that Apple looked to strip everything they could from the OS to reduce the size (both to save download time, and to save space on SSD drives), and decided Front Row wasn't used enough to stay. Hopefully the hardware IR receiver doesn't also get the boot later. They already pulled it from the Air with the refresh last year.


There is a Safari Adblock extension. I think I recommended Glimmerblocker to you back before Safari properly supported extensions.

I'm still debating what I think about Lion overall. I did get used to the gestures on the touchpad pretty quickly, and found them handy in combination with full screen apps on the Air. Now that I also have the Pro desktop upgraded, I'll get a better feel for it as a desktop OS instead of as a laptop OS.

Oh, for those that might be looking for it, Xcode 4 is free in the App Store if you have Lion installed. Server is also in there as a $50 upgrade. I may install it on the Mini just to see what I can do with it.

We don't have it yet at work, because making your OS upgrade available on the app store isn't the most corporate-friendly arrangement. They're still trying to figure out how they'll do the site license and get actual installation media, which I would assume Apple has some sort of plan for.

Most of those UI changes (other than the full screen stuff) sound like steps backward, but the one Lion feature I really do need is whole disk encryption. PGP always has incompatibilities with OS updates, so having the encryption baked into the OS will be a welcome addition.

Finder still sucks? Big surprise there...

That part makes sense, though I agree with Bruno that I'd always want them to show. I always assumed that mobile devices did this due to a lack of screen real estate. That's not necessary on a desktop/laptop.

I'm curious about what you guys think of the default behavior for scrolling, which I hear they've reversed to match the iPad/iPhone. Is that true? What do you guys think of it?

I'm sure it will be fairly quick to adapt to. Unless of course like me you spend all day switching between a Mac and Windows.

The huge upside, of course, from my perspective is the improved security model. Many improvements here including ASLR and sandboxes.

El Reg has a quick summary here: http://www.reghardware.com/2011/07/21/mac_os_x_lion_security/

It's one of those things that's easy to validate conceptually, but in practice it doesn't necessarily work well - at least not right away.

The standard way is that you scroll/swipe on a trackpad to move the view. The scroll direction follows your eyes which is also the rectangle surrounding the document and also equivalent to the direction you'd move the scroll bars.

The new model draws a parallel to the physical world where you're moving the content. IMO, even though one may get used to it, I don't think it will ever be as natural as on a mobile device, mainly because you're not actually touching the content when using a trackpad. That disconnect makes a huge difference. I may try getting used to it for a few weeks after I finally install Lion on my boot drive.

They will be selling Lion on a USB stick in August. The announcement for that was tucked away in the press release. Not sure if the "App Store for Business" setup will be extended to the Mac App Store for this, or something else.


I forgot to mention this is a preference too. System Preferences - General - Show scroll bars setting.



Yep, it's reversed by default. They are calling the setting "natural" scrolling, meaning it works like the touchscreen world where your fingers are pushing the metaphorical "sheet" of content up when moving up, vs the traditional scrolling being a manipulation of the scroll bar. I've adapted to it on the touchpads, though switching back and forth is a bit weird. It makes a bit of sense if you ever work with both an iPad and a touchpad on the Mac within a short amount of time. For the scroll wheel on traditional mice, I'm not sure what I think about the change there. For now, I've reverted where I use a mouse, due to it also impacting how games read it.


The transition between Lion and Snow Leopard machines is a bit annoying, so I'll probably install something to reverse it on the Snow Leopard side. Gruber linked to 2 solutions for this, along with one for Window too.

1 Million Lion purchases/downloads so far. That's a cool ~$30 Million for Apple in less than 2 days. I'm pretty sure their OS is going to make them a lot more money this time around at $29 than it ever did at $129.

Xcode+Fullscreen+Spaces "3 fingered swipe" is brilliant, makes Xcode usable on a laptop.

Simulator to the left, Xcode in the middle and documentation to the right.

If only they'd make the iOS simulator work with the trackpad for scrolling....

I actually like the reverse scrolling, only takes a couple of hours to get used to.

I don't have a problem with the disappearing scrollbars either, maybe I've just become used to using the iPhone & iPad that it seems natural on the Mac.

Found a bug, if you launch safari and three finger swipe to dashboard but keep your fingers held down, by pressing other keys (escape/volume) you can get safari stuck in the dashboard!

I'm not really upset with them trying to change this setting, and I can see it making some sense with trackpads, and someone on GDGT made a good observation that Apple no longer sells a product with a scroll wheel.

However, it seems to me that it would have been fairly trivial to program the OS to recognize when you're using a scroll wheel/ball versus a trackpad.

I also agree with you Bruno, that for me there would be a disconnect between the screen and the mouse.

I think I could probably get used to it after a while, but I suppose I just don't see the change as being necessary.

Anyway, go East Dillon!

Is it me or has my MBP battery life taken a pounding under Lion ???

Cheers

Cris

You're not alone, I've seen others complain about the same thing. In my testing I was using a bus-powered drive to boot from, so that wouldn't be an ideal way to compare to my normal usage. I didn't take the time to do any on-battery tests after finding that the other things I was looking at were already failing - including my own software.

i haven't noticed particularly any difference, yet. 15" unibody from last august.

For better or worse, I'm way too busy to monkey around with upgrading my computers to Lion. Hopefully, two weeks from now I'll have the chance and, by then, Apple will have sorted out all these issues.

I'm liking the app resume feature more then I thought I would. At first, it irritated me that old document windows would reopen when I open a program. Now that I'm getting into the habit of closing windows and documents when I'm done, vs closing the app to do so, the feature is coming in handy in other areas. Just updated my Mini to 10.7.1, and after rebooting, my desktop came back exactly as I left it.

Shutting down is also more pleasant, since I'm not bombarded with save windows from notes I tend to make in a text editor. It's just saved automatically and will restore the way I left it.

Do you have a 2010 model with the Intel and NVidia graphics? I was hearing some complaints about the drivers having issues, and the system potentially using the NVidia chip more then it needed to. 10.7.1 may address it, as they did touch some graphics related extensions.

I actually really like the launcher, I find it useful. For example, I have my most frequently used applications in the dock bar, but there are a whole load of other apps which I use slightly less frequently. Now, if I added all of these to the dock, then the icons would be minuscule and the dock would be huge.

The fact that I can use the gesture to bring up the launcher and then organise the screens so that I have minimal effort to launch these other applications.

Natural scrolling has become, well, second nature.

I had to revert to the classic view in mail, because the iOS style view just didn't work for me on a laptop, but that's just personal preference.

I have the 2011 Thunderbolt version. If I am surfing a full charge seems to give me about 4 hours use, but if I open lightroom I get about an hour. It was always bad when I opened lightroom, but never that bad!

Cheers

Cris