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Resolved Nervous about upgrading to Lion. Worried about Mail and iCal...is Lion for me?

W

wineandcarbs

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
May 2, 2008
904
137
Hi all,

I know that forums tend to have more info about issues with things because, well, people tend to come here for help with things vs. to rave about a product. I've gone back and forth on whether to upgrade to Lion. I'd appreciate some input.

First, I have no problems with Snow Leopard but am a little intrigued by Lion. I am using a 2011 MBP, 2.3Ghz i5, 4gb RAM (base model 13"), in case that makes a difference with my questions below.

  • I don't use Spaces or Expose (I actually can't even remember what Expose is, and I don't even know how to activate Spaces at the moment, since I have never felt compelled to use it...I know, bad OS X user), so I am not too concerned about the complaints people have made about Spaces being better executed than what is offered in Lion.
  • My main concerns are Mail and iCal, because I use these very, very frequently. Will I need to re-set up Exchange with Mail? I use Exchange for OTA sync between my iPhone and computer for my email, calendar and contacts. The new mail interface (and possibly calendar if IIRC) were what initially intrigued me about Lion, so I'm a little nervous about this. Someone said something about not being able to close a new message window easily?! This sounds odd... lol.
  • I also frequently use Preview (sometimes to crop images), iTunes, and I use MS Office for Mac a lot (mainly just Word). I'm not sure if there are any known issues/bugs with these?
  • Do I need to be concerned about particular non-native apps not working with Lion? I use Split and Concave to join files and Planbook as a computer-based daybook for work.
  • Is the dock still available in full-screen mode for apps? When I scroll to the bottom will I see the dock? Can I disable full-screen if I don't like it?

I realize there are a multitude of threads on OS X Lion and I have sifted through some of them but they didn't necessarily address these particular concerns. Thank you in advance.
 
Last edited:
M

mwxiao

macrumors regular
Jul 5, 2007
228
5
CT
Stop worrying and don't be nervous. It's just a software upgrade. Just go ahead and do it. Your life is still the same.
 
S

stefan1975

macrumors 6502a
Apr 15, 2010
605
0
if you have no problems running SL i wouldn't upgrade. what is in it besides some new graphical toys? it uses the same kernel SL does.

Also there are supposedly graphical issues with the 2011 mbp intel igp graphics card driver, being 5x as slow as in SL, i have a 2010 mbp so i would't know about that.

also there seem to be issues with office 2011 (and especially 2008), but M$ will probably fix those.

i'd wait until at least 10.7.1 and see if the video driver issues are resolved.
 
W

wineandcarbs

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
May 2, 2008
904
137
Thanks for the input guys! I know it's just a software update but I rely on my computer enough that I don't want to cause inconveniences unnecessarily.

stefan, thanks for the input. It is still pretty new - I'll wait until the next update. TBH - the only real updates I was interested in were the interface differences in mail and ical. Nothing of real substance.
 
E

eternalife

macrumors regular
Jul 21, 2011
159
0
No real productivity reasons for upgrading. So if you rely on your computer to feed the family I wouldn't touch it until .7.2 comes out. Seems that will add some nice features. Right now (IMO) it is just additional eye candy.
 
L

LIVEFRMNYC

macrumors G3
Oct 27, 2009
8,780
10,844
MacNovius said:
It's pretty easy to to install Lion on a separate partition and try it out while keeping you current set up safe. Here's link you can check out.
http://osxdaily.com/2011/03/12/how-to-install-dual-boot-mac-os-x-10-7-lion-and-10-6-snow-leopard/
Click to expand...





A bit off topic but I did the exact same thing shown in the pic below(that's on the link). Wasn't going to erase Snow Leopard until I knew Lion was legit for me.

mac-os-x-partitions-lion-snowleopard.jpg


Now the problem I had was when I decided to delete Snow Leopard partition and use Lion as my main OS. Cause Lion was at the bottom as shown in the pic, I couldn't resize it to my liking nor find an option to move it to the top no matter what I did.

To get around that, I rebooted and entered Recovery Disk Assistant. Then I deleted all partitions and created new ones. After that, I selected "Restore from Time Machine Backup". Pointed the backup(from external drive of course) to the top partition which I already labeled. Now I can resize bigger if I ever needed to.

Now it looks like this ......

89395


I just though some would like to know this since most use minimal or less than average space when trying a new OS in another partition.
 
N

nanosour

macrumors member
Dec 14, 2009
47
5
Just a heads up the MS Office for Mac 2004 will not work on Lion. I never went to 2008 as I didn't care for the interface. Lion broke my MS Office and now I'm using Pages. Not too bad since Pages does read all my word docs. Be careful on this and expect some surprises if you go to Lion.

Another notable is that Rosetta is not supported in Lion, so any older PPC applications you may use will not work. Quicken 2007 is a good example that affects quite a few users.

Finally, if you run several applications at a time, explore spaces. It's great to have each application assigned to its own desktop every time you start it. Really unclutters your workspace.

Nano
 
A

artguy3d

macrumors member
Apr 2, 2010
41
0
beyondthesmile said:
Hi all,

I know that forums tend to have more info about issues with things because, well, people tend to come here for help with things vs. to rave about a product. I've gone back and forth on whether to upgrade to Lion. I'd appreciate some input.

First, I have no problems with Snow Leopard but am a little intrigued by Lion. I am using a 2011 MBP, 2.3Ghz i5, 4gb RAM (base model 13"), in case that makes a difference with my questions below.

  • I don't use Spaces or Expose (I actually can't even remember what Expose is, and I don't even know how to activate Spaces at the moment, since I have never felt compelled to use it...I know, bad OS X user), so I am not too concerned about the complaints people have made about Spaces being better executed than what is offered in Lion.
  • My main concerns are Mail and iCal, because I use these very, very frequently. Will I need to re-set up Exchange with Mail? I use Exchange for OTA sync between my iPhone and computer for my email, calendar and contacts. The new mail interface (and possibly calendar if IIRC) were what initially intrigued me about Lion, so I'm a little nervous about this. Someone said something about not being able to close a new message window easily?! This sounds odd... lol.
  • I also frequently use Preview (sometimes to crop images), iTunes, and I use MS Office for Mac a lot (mainly just Word). I'm not sure if there are any known issues/bugs with these?
  • Do I need to be concerned about particular non-native apps not working with Lion? I use Split and Concave to join files and Planbook as a computer-based daybook for work.
  • Is the dock still available in full-screen mode for apps? When I scroll to the bottom will I see the dock? Can I disable full-screen if I don't like it?

I realize there are a multitude of threads on OS X Lion and I have sifted through some of them but they didn't necessarily address these particular concerns. Thank you in advance.
Click to expand...

I'm sure what Split and Concave are so you will need to enlighten me on that. I can say that my version of Office didn't work and some of my powerpoint files won't load in keynote. And I like the SL email program better.

I'm taking a system back to Snow Leopard right now. Best advise I have if you do it is make a full backup on a separate bootable drive using superduper or something like that so you can go back to SL with out losing everything...

Bit of a pain in the behind.
 
W

wineandcarbs

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
May 2, 2008
904
137
artguy3d said:
I'm sure what Split and Concave are so you will need to enlighten me on that. I can say that my version of Office didn't work and some of my powerpoint files won't load in keynote. And I like the SL email program better.

I'm taking a system back to Snow Leopard right now. Best advise I have if you do it is make a full backup on a separate bootable drive using superduper or something like that so you can go back to SL with out losing everything...

Bit of a pain in the behind.
Click to expand...

Split and Concave is actually just a program for joining files, kind of like HJSplit for PC. I download TV shows/movies sometimes and they are sometimes split into multiple files so it just connects them.

Thank you for the input everyone! I think I am going to hold off a little.... I appreciate the assistance. :)
 
tigres

tigres

macrumors 601
Aug 31, 2007
4,213
1,326
Land of the Free-Waiting for Term Limits
Save yourself the grief, and stay happy where your at. Lion mail has issues with IMAP for many, and SMB folders is busted as well. If you don't mind spending production time of your day fixing what Lion broke, then good luck.

Many seem to be ok with it, but for business users it has been a cluster- at least for me. I had it for about 5 days and went back to SL.
 
W

wineandcarbs

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
May 2, 2008
904
137
BiggAW said:
Who cares... Mail and iCal are useless junk anyways.
Click to expand...

Not to me. I use them frequently with MS Exchange. Aside from Safari, they're probably my most used apps.

tigres said:
Save yourself the grief, and stay happy where your at. Lion mail has issues with IMAP for many, and SMB folders is busted as well. If you don't mind spending production time of your day fixing what Lion broke, then good luck.

Many seem to be ok with it, but for business users it has been a cluster- at least for me. I had it for about 5 days and went back to SL.
Click to expand...

Going to take your advice and save myself the grief. Thanks you (and everyone else on this thread)
 
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