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.

My New iMac

My new iMac arrived today, a little earlier than expected (total time from order to delivery at my door was 5 days, including the weekend). So I've spent the last few hours setting it up and trying it out.

First impression: wow, it's fast! Granted, I'm upgrading from a 5-year old model, and in the last few months (since my original iMac's hard drive went), I've been using a 5-year old MacBook with orange juice in its innards, but still, massive improvements. No more waiting for apps to load, no more horrid beach balls. I've even noticed improvements in webpage responses - a problem that I'd attributed to our internet connection but clearly was due to my system really not being up for the challenge.

I was running Snow Leopard on the old computer so no surprises as far as the operating system goes. I'll qualify for Apple's free Up-To-Date Program once Lion comes up, so there'll be a new learning curve.

I already had a full keyboard from my old iMac, so I got the mini keyboard (similar to a laptop keyboard) for this one. The space saved on the desk is nice, and I don't use most of the extra keys on a full keyboard anyway, but I may miss the forward delete key. I figure I'd rather have two different keyboards than two similar ones, and I can always switch them around further down the track.

I ummed and ahed for a while on the Magic Mouse vs. Magic Trackpad decision. I eventually decided to go for the trackpad on the grounds that Lion is going to use even more gestures than Snow Leopard does, so the trackpad will let me try out all the funky new moves. Plus, I'm used to using my iPad/iPhone, and using a trackpad on a laptop, and I do have an old-style Apple Mouse I can fall back on if I need to. I'm still not sure that I made the right choice - using the trackpad all the time feels a little wearing on my fingertips, but I'll see whether I adjust as I use it a bit more.

Now I face the overwhelming task of moving all my data over to the new computer. I have the files on my MacBook to copy, plus the Time Machine backup of my old iMac, frequently containing different versions of the same file (although sometimes the MacBook is more up to date and sometimes the backup is more up to date). Still not sure what the best way to tackle it all is, but I guess I'll get there eventually.

Snow Leopard

With the release of the App Store I decided it was time to finally fork out for the upgrade to Snow Leopard. I ordered it on Friday night so I had to wait until Monday before it was shipped but it arrived promptly on Saturday morning (so glad Apple changed to TNT overnight shipping; it used to take a week to get stuff shipped from the Apple Store).

The install was all very straightforward. I'd read some horror stories on the internet so I was a little bit worried but it all turned out fine. The upgrade cleared out about 6gb on my harddrive, which I was very happy about since I'm constantly running low. My only real complaint was that the version on the DVD was 10.6.3 so I had to use Software Update to upgrade to 10.6.6, which involved a 1gb download. Not too bad with our current internet setup but a few months ago it could have been an overnight job.

I was still running iLife '08 so I upgraded iPhoto using the App Store as I was eager to finally try out Faces. While not as accurate as I'd hoped it would be, it's still pretty awesome. I will probably upgrade iMovie as well at some point, but I finished off making a DVD of last year's holiday to Brunei before I did the Snow Leopard install so there's no rush. I haven't used Garageband for ages so I'm not sure if I'll make that upgrade or not. Even if I do end up upgrading all three apps, it still saves me a few bucks over buying the DVD, plus it comes off my iTunes balance so it becomes part of my Christmas present rather than coming out of my savings.

I haven't noticed any speed changes with Snow Leopard; there hasn't been an improvement but it doesn't seem to have any trouble running with the minimum 1gb of memory. I did have a vague hope that it might help my problems with Firefox freezing up while playing Lord of Ultima, but I think that has more to do with the game itself than anything on my end.

I still need to install and try out Facetime, and fiddle around with the other changes that come with an OS upgrade, but so far I'm happy with my upgrade-to-Snow-Leopard experience.