OS X Lion thoughts

OS X Lion

I’ve been wanting to write some thoughts about Apple’s new operating system release, OS X Lion for a while now. Being the nerd that I am I upgraded the day it was released and have been using it on my primary machine since. So far, there is a lot that I like and most of the things I don’t like are pretty trivial. So after a month’s worth of daily use I thought I’d post some thoughts for my few followers out there. Before I dive in though, I want to acknowledge that my thoughts on Lion reflect the way I use my computer and the regular tasks I use it for. People who work differently or use their machine for different tasks may have a very different experience.

My general experience with Lion has been that it is fairly stable and snappy. I’m running it on a late 2008 Aluminum MacBook with a 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo processor and 8GB of RAM. That said, there were a couple of initial experiences with things running more slowly than expected.

When you first fire up your computer after installing Lion the operating system begins reindexing the hard drive for the purpose of speeding up searches in the future. You will know it is happening because of the pulsing dot in the middle of the magnifying glass icon in the upper right corner of the menu bar. While this process is going on everything slows down. It took a minute to figure out what was going on but once I did I just let the process run its course (it took about five minutes) and then things worked very smoothly.

The other initial problem was one that has been highly documented. The new version of Safari (v. 5.1) that ships with Lion tends to bog the system down over time. I won’t go into the technicals of why that is but because I usually keep Safari open I noticed that as the day wore on, I would start to see spinning beach balls. If I quit Safari and relaunched it everything got snappy again. There is hope that this issue will be fixed in a future update. The solution I opted for was a memory upgrade from 2GB to 8GB (something I was wanting to do anyway) since RAM is incredibly cheap right now (I only spent $50 for 8GB). If you don’t keep Safari open all of the time or use a different browser this likely won’t be a problem for you.

With those initial speed bumps dealt with my experience has been almost entirely positive. It only took about two days to get used to the new “natural scrolling” method which inverts the traditional scrolling direction in an attempt to unify scrolling conventions between all of Apple’s iDevices and their desktops. This is a feature that you can disable in System Preferences if you don’t want to mess with it. As an iPod touch user I was familiar with it and wanted to embrace the change. I do think that working primarily on a laptop made the transition easier.

Speaking of scrolling on the MacBook brings up one of my favorite new features: multi-touch gestures. A good number of tasks that used to require pushing a button on screen or using the keyboard can now be accomplished with gestures on the trackpad. (As an aside, I use a Magic Mouse at work which also supports many of the new gestures.) Paging backwards and forwards in Safari or iCal is an easy two-finger swipe sideways. Moving between Dashboard or any of my virtual desktops (Spaces) is a simple three-finger swipe sideways. Invoking Mission Control (more in a moment), three fingers swiped up. Even at work where I use an external monitor I occasionally find myself reaching over to the MacBook’s trackpad to use a gesture I can’t get on the Magic Mouse.

It has been the above mentioned gesture to invoke Mission Control and the one that allows easy cycling through virtual desktops that has finally got me using the Spaces feature that has been a part of OS X for some time. In Lion, Apple has integrated Spaces and Expose to put not only window management but desktop management in one place. The three-finger up-swipe instantly lets me add a new workspace or arrange applications in the ones currently running. The ability to three-finger-swipe from one workspace to another has mostly replaced my old habit of using the application switcher to move between open programs. It’s fewer movements and much easier than hunting through the dock for the appropriate icon. I know people have been using Spaces for years but gestures has finally made it usable for me.

As for other parts I’ve liked so far, the new version of Mail is wonderful. I had been using an extension with the previous version of Mail to get the preview pane on the right side instead of below the list of messages. Lion’s version of Mail uses this setup as the default. With today’s widescreen formatted monitors the left-to-right approach really does make more sense and it allows you to see a longer portion of the message list than when it was above the preview pane. Threaded conversations are really helpful as well. In my work there are always a series of conversations going on with different groups of people. Having them automatically grouped by conversation thread helps me tremendously in finding messages and following a flow of thought. I know that there are probably other email clients out there that have had these features for a while, but I’ve always liked the speed and clean look of Apple’s Mail versus something like Microsoft Entourage.

iCal is another application that I use regularly and although it doesn’t seem to have had as many changes made to it I still like what I see. In the Lion version Apple has removed the calendar list on the left side of the screen to make more room for the actual calendar. The list can still be accessed via a pop-over, a feature borrowed from the iPad version. I don’t tend to do a lot of turning calendars on or off so I don’t miss the persistent list and I like the extra calendar space, especially when I’m in laptop mode. Overall, the presentation of information seems cleaner to me. The Day view is just like the iPad version with a scrollable list of upcoming events on the left and the day’s schedule on the right. The week view is largely unchanged from what I can tell but I don’t use that view very often. My default is the month view and I like what they’ve done with it. The current day is highlighted in with blue text and the shading of all day events is lighter making the text more readable. My only mild complaint, and it really is mild, is that Apple has borrowed the leather desk calendar look from the iPad version. It isn’t bad I just don’t think it adds anything. I’d personally prefer a return to the metallic look of Snow Leopard.

The one cool feature that I’m really looking forward to using but haven’t yet is AirDrop. AirDrop allows you to find any other Lion-running computer on your current network and quickly send a file to it without having to do all sorts of pairing or logging in. It really is drag-and-drop file transfer. I’ve been using DropCopy for years to do the same thing but Apple’s implementation looks super slick. All I need now is some Lion-using people in my life that I can send files to.

This has gotten much longer than I intended so let me wrap up with a few dislikes. None of them are deal-breakers or even that annoying to me, I’d just prefer a different approach. One of my favorite Leopard and Snow Leopard features was the incremental volume control. By pressing option-shift with volume up or down you could increase or decrease the volume by one quarter of a block instead of a whole block. It really let you fine-tune your volume. This feature has been removed in Lion and I hope it will be restored in a future update.

Another omission from previous iterations of the operating system is the show/hide sidebar widget in the upper right corner of all Finder windows. Most people never used it and probably won’t know it is gone. Personally, I used it a lot when unmounting installer disk images. Much of the software we install is presented in a Finder window with a custom background image with the application and an alias of the Applications folder in it. You simply drag the application to the alias and it gets installed in the appropriate place on your computer. But then what? You can close the window, find the open image on your desktop, unmount it and then delete the disk image file. Pre-Lion you could click the little widget in the upper right of the window and the sidebar would appear which would allow you to eject the image (and close the window) with one click. It only saved a few clicks but I install software often enough that taking the extra steps seems a little less efficient.

There are a couple of other little things (one is an interface inconsistency) but they aren’t really worth getting into. Overall, I’ve been very pleased with Lion and enjoy working with it daily. I’d love to hear about your Lion experiences so far so feel free to comment.