Lion

So Wednesday was the big day for the release of OS X Lion. Along with (I'm sure) many other people, I haunted twitter for word that it was out, then spent a couple of frustrating minutes hitting reload on the App store, then the Up-to-date page, then the Apple online store, before I could get my code and start downloading (that was just me being impatient though; if I'd just waited five minutes everything would have gone perfectly smoothly). The download only took about an hour and a half, much less than I'd anticipated, so I was able to install before I went to bed on Wednesday night, although not much else. Everything went nicely on top of my existing Snow Leopard install.

There are a bunch of changes to the visual appearance of the operating system and key applications, but none of them have really jumped out at me. I'm not getting excited about them, but I'm not upset about them either.

I'm liking the new gestures in Lion and I'm glad now that I went for the Magic Trackpad. I have all the options turned on except tap to click, which has always annoyed me, since I have a tendency to hit the trackpad and then change my mind, resulting in a lot of accidental clicks. I love three finger drag though, saves a lot of the wear on my finger that concerned me initially about the trackpad. Discovered also that you can start the drag with three fingers and then reduce to only one finger to take advantage of the whole width of the trackpad. I still mess up occasionally with the natural scroll direction, but I'm adjusting to it very quickly and in the long term I think it will reduce the number of mistakes when switching between the computer and the iPad. The thumb and three finger gestures sounded awkward, but actually doing them seems pretty natural. My only complaint is that 4 finger swipe switches between full-screen apps but not between spaces.

On that note, it's taking me a bit to adjust to the new Mission Control and I'm not sure that it's an improvement over the old Expose + Spaces system. On earlier OSes I tended to have a lot of spaces and not many windows in each space, so I mainly used the Spaces functionality and not the Expose functionality. Combining them into Mission Control makes it more difficult to switch between spaces and remember which space a particular window is in because the spaces are now in a straight line. I'm wondering whether it's worth reorganising my system to better suit Mission Control, especially since I'm now on a bigger screen so the motivation to reduce the amount of stuff in one space is reduced.

My favourite feature of Lion is definitely the autosave. Combined with a new backup drive that is actually big enough to backup my whole hard-drive, I feel much more confident about my data (I'm pretty bad about remembering to save). It also reduces the number of dialog boxes I have to deal with if I need to restart for an update.

I was a bit sceptical about the auto-correct features being brought over from the iPad and the iPhone because of the notoriously bad corrects that it makes there, but it seems much better on the computer. I suspect it's due to the kind of typos that I make on the computer compared to the ones I make on the iPad - when I'm using a regular keyboard I'm more likely to transpose the order of letters, which auto-correct does a good job of fixing, whereas on the iPad I'm more likely to hit the wrong letter, or skip a letter all together, which generally makes it less obvious what word I was aiming for.

Overall I feel like Lion offers more for a new computer user, or at least a new Mac user, than it does for someone upgrading from Snow Leopard, since it requires some changes to the way you use your computer in order to fully utilise all the new features. If I'd had to pay for the upgrade, I might not have bothered, except that I'm sure future versions of some apps will have Lion as a minimum requirement.