I’ve been using Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion” for about a week, and here are some first thoughts.
- The “natural direction” scrolling, in which directions are reversed on the trackpad so that you are moving with your document rather than moving with its scrollbars, isn’t really getting in my way, but isn’t really comfortable either. Jury’s out.
- I didn’t think I would, but I like the mini scrollbars, and that they’re hidden until needed.
- Certainly seems stable enough, and I think I will be recommending it to clients who want it once the 10.7.2 release lands (and doesn’t appear to have any issues itself). It seems less problematic to me than 10.5.0 and 10.6.0 did.
- Mac App Store, which appeared in the later revisions of Snow Leopard, is pretty nice, though I do like the full control of doing my own downloading. Having it all centralized through Apple, iOS style, kind of weirds me out.
- Not being able to run PowerPC applications is a pain. I certainly have a few I use once in a while. We’ll see whether Snow Leopard in Parallels is good enough for when I need them.
- Boots up super super fast on my MacBook Air. (Snow Leopard did too, but Lion seems even faster.)
- I like the new Mail layout MUCH more than I thought I would. (I was bracing myself for it.) In particular I like the conversation view in which each message is separated onto its own “sheet” in a single thread. It seems faster, too.
- I like the default desktop picture, for probably the first time in the history of any Mac OS. It’s yet another space scene, but somehow more appealing than the previous iterations.
- I don’t really like “restore all windows” on restart, and would prefer that the default be to NOT do so. (Maybe there’s a hidden pref for that.) Being able to click something that would do it when I wanted it after startup would be useful. (It could ignore me if too much had changed since startup.)
- I don’t mind the monochrome grey everywhere as much as I thought I would. I kind of like it. Classy looking.
- The new, smaller window buttons are displeasing both aesthetically and usability-wise. They look particularly bad in the Mac App Store.
- For all the new features, nothing feels radically different, either. I wouldn’t say my computing life has been radically improved or degraded by Lion. Perhaps that will change once iCloud is on the scene, or if I used more of Apple’s programs (e.g. Pages). Lion simply feels, appropriately, like a further refinement of the same operating system Apple introduced ten years ago, which itself was a hybrid of the ideas and technology of Mac OS 9 and OpenSTEP, the advanced but obscure UNIX-based operating system developed by Steve Jobs at NeXT. Plus ça change.