It's really frustrating. I'm a big fan of a lot of the improvements in Lion. The gestures are great. The updated apps are great. And the concept of Mission control is pretty good, but only if you're working with one display, on a 15 inch screen, with only a handful of casual apps open.
For me, a photographer and business owner who relies heavily on the Mac to boost productivity, Mission Control is two steps in the right direction, and three steps back.
For example, when using Spaces, we were given a unified view of every space on the main display. This was great for a number of reasons, it made throwing apps from one space to another really fast. Something that's gone in Lion. You can't directly drag apps from one Desktop to another in Mission Control, you have to actually switch to the Desktop, then reenter Mission Control then drag it to the Desktop you want. How unnecessarily complicated, unintuitive, and totally un-apple Like.
The grid display also made switching spaces really fast. In a four Spaces set up, switching to Space 3 was only one keystroke away (down). Now, with Mission Control, switching to Desktop 3 requires no fewer than two keystrokes or gestures. Furthermore, there's no direct input, as far as I can tell. There's no quick jump straight to Desktop 4, or Desktop 15. Spaces, while not as intuitive, could dramatically boost productivity once you became accustomed to it. With Mission Control, regardless of how familiar you become, you're always going to be bogged down by a cumbersome system.
Adding to the annoyance, there's no unified view of your Desktops in a multi-display set up. When you enter Mission Control, each display shows you its own desktops. This means if I have three displays and 4 desktops, then when entering Mission Control, I have to search through 12 different desktop thumbnails on three displays for the desktop I'm looking for, rather than having all the display's desktops appear on one unified screen.
Perhaps the most frustrating is that Expose was never especially helpful for me. It always felt cluttered and took more time than necessary to find the things I wanted. I always preferred to spread my workflow across several different Spaces so that I never really needed Expose. Now, they've dumbed down the Spaces idea into Desktops and they've clearly put more emphasis on the Expose concept, which is really getting in my way.
The Desktop assignments also seem pretty buggy. Sometimes Lion will forget where they belong after restarting the computer. What the crap is that about?
Finally, trivial as it may seem, the animations when switching between desktops are kind of laughable. Why does the menubar and the desktop icons slide out when you switch to a different Desktop, but only the menu bar slides back in with the new desktop. The desktop icons abruptly fade in, rather than just already being on the desktop? It's senseless. As far as I can tell, there's no way to put some icons on one desktop and other icons on another. It's just a meaningless animation that distracts the eye and confuses what's going on. And applications assigned to 'All Desktops' are the biggest joke. Rather than the apps assigned to all desktops simply staying put, they slide out with the desktop, and rather than sliding back in on the new desktop, they just abruptly appear once the desktop comes to a stop. It looks so unrefined and it's really distracting. Rather than being able to become really entrenched in a workflow, I'm constantly reminded of an app that I may more may not be actively using. It's jarring and ugly and almost seems like something must be wrong with it.
I'm concerned that as Apple's market share goes up, they're going to be providing less and less for the truly professional users. Which bothers me because it's STILL better than Windows for productivity, but it could be so much better, it's just that I won't be a target market anymore, so the products won't be designed to really fit my needs.
Venting over, for now. Commiserations?
For me, a photographer and business owner who relies heavily on the Mac to boost productivity, Mission Control is two steps in the right direction, and three steps back.
For example, when using Spaces, we were given a unified view of every space on the main display. This was great for a number of reasons, it made throwing apps from one space to another really fast. Something that's gone in Lion. You can't directly drag apps from one Desktop to another in Mission Control, you have to actually switch to the Desktop, then reenter Mission Control then drag it to the Desktop you want. How unnecessarily complicated, unintuitive, and totally un-apple Like.
The grid display also made switching spaces really fast. In a four Spaces set up, switching to Space 3 was only one keystroke away (down). Now, with Mission Control, switching to Desktop 3 requires no fewer than two keystrokes or gestures. Furthermore, there's no direct input, as far as I can tell. There's no quick jump straight to Desktop 4, or Desktop 15. Spaces, while not as intuitive, could dramatically boost productivity once you became accustomed to it. With Mission Control, regardless of how familiar you become, you're always going to be bogged down by a cumbersome system.
Adding to the annoyance, there's no unified view of your Desktops in a multi-display set up. When you enter Mission Control, each display shows you its own desktops. This means if I have three displays and 4 desktops, then when entering Mission Control, I have to search through 12 different desktop thumbnails on three displays for the desktop I'm looking for, rather than having all the display's desktops appear on one unified screen.
Perhaps the most frustrating is that Expose was never especially helpful for me. It always felt cluttered and took more time than necessary to find the things I wanted. I always preferred to spread my workflow across several different Spaces so that I never really needed Expose. Now, they've dumbed down the Spaces idea into Desktops and they've clearly put more emphasis on the Expose concept, which is really getting in my way.
The Desktop assignments also seem pretty buggy. Sometimes Lion will forget where they belong after restarting the computer. What the crap is that about?
Finally, trivial as it may seem, the animations when switching between desktops are kind of laughable. Why does the menubar and the desktop icons slide out when you switch to a different Desktop, but only the menu bar slides back in with the new desktop. The desktop icons abruptly fade in, rather than just already being on the desktop? It's senseless. As far as I can tell, there's no way to put some icons on one desktop and other icons on another. It's just a meaningless animation that distracts the eye and confuses what's going on. And applications assigned to 'All Desktops' are the biggest joke. Rather than the apps assigned to all desktops simply staying put, they slide out with the desktop, and rather than sliding back in on the new desktop, they just abruptly appear once the desktop comes to a stop. It looks so unrefined and it's really distracting. Rather than being able to become really entrenched in a workflow, I'm constantly reminded of an app that I may more may not be actively using. It's jarring and ugly and almost seems like something must be wrong with it.
I'm concerned that as Apple's market share goes up, they're going to be providing less and less for the truly professional users. Which bothers me because it's STILL better than Windows for productivity, but it could be so much better, it's just that I won't be a target market anymore, so the products won't be designed to really fit my needs.
Venting over, for now. Commiserations?
