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Apple Releases First Developer Preview of Mac OS X Lion
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This Lion preview shows a different UI feel, but I was also expecting a different UI look. That is unless they’re holding back at this time, brushed metal is still here…that is predominately…as some applications already have a somewhat different look…such as iTunes and the pro apps. This has always bugged me, as I like a consistent look across all of the applications. I’m surprised that Apple has allowed this as a consistent user experience is important to them too. It would be nice if the OS could (but not must) enforce a consistent look across all applications…whether it be the current aqua/brushed metal and/or what’s next. Although maybe I’m not forward thinking enough what with the increasing move to full screen apps and the change to the scroll bar.
I wonder if Apple will develop an AirDrop application for Windows. Unfortunately, given Windows though, the” it doesn’t require setup or special settings” mantra may not be realistic. There would have to be fiddling on the Windows side.
Lion Server is a Wiki Server…yes! And file sharing with iPad!
[Edit] Why isn't file sharing between Mac and iPad part of AirDrop which is integrated with Finder? This would have made more sense.
Except for the track pad swipe, how is Mission Control fundamentally different from Expose?
What’s up with Finder? I don’t expect it to go away, but I hope there are some positive enhancements to it. The same applies to Quick Look.
The combination of Auto Save and Versions really concerns me. There are many times when I’m making changes to a document, and after 5 minutes I’m like….no…this is not what I want. So I close the document without saving, reopen, and ta da, back to where I want to be. If I’m reading things right the document is auto saved in real time, but versioned every hour. What!
I’m going to have to test drive Lion extensively in the Apple Store before buying…and not until after a point release or two.
I wonder if Apple will develop an AirDrop application for Windows. Unfortunately, given Windows though, the” it doesn’t require setup or special settings” mantra may not be realistic. There would have to be fiddling on the Windows side.
Lion Server is a Wiki Server…yes! And file sharing with iPad!
[Edit] Why isn't file sharing between Mac and iPad part of AirDrop which is integrated with Finder? This would have made more sense.
Except for the track pad swipe, how is Mission Control fundamentally different from Expose?
What’s up with Finder? I don’t expect it to go away, but I hope there are some positive enhancements to it. The same applies to Quick Look.
The combination of Auto Save and Versions really concerns me. There are many times when I’m making changes to a document, and after 5 minutes I’m like….no…this is not what I want. So I close the document without saving, reopen, and ta da, back to where I want to be. If I’m reading things right the document is auto saved in real time, but versioned every hour. What!
I’m going to have to test drive Lion extensively in the Apple Store before buying…and not until after a point release or two.
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Sorry Apple I don't want what your trying to sell me... I like apps that close and go away fully never to bother me again until I ask for them. Snow Leopard was a nice move, just enhanced Leopard features, Lion is too radical... It looks like I will be staying with SL for some time.
First? I don't think so. Every OS except Windows and Mac OS has done this for decades.
Mac OS is based on top of BSD which is what today we'd call a server OS and it goes way back to the 1970's
Going back in history more, the name "UNIX" coined in I think about 1969 was a play on another name "MULTIX" with the point the unix was moch smaller and more simple. It was, multix was huge and it of course predated unix. So "first" no way the first one happened more than 40 years ago
I think the Linux crowd has little to no benefit with trying to "convert" the general public. The general public for the most part is conservative, as is all mankind (and that's a historically proven survival instinct, so I see nothing bad about it), and drags Linux community down and behind by constant requests to make it more like Windows or more like Mac.
My personal opinion is that Linux should continue to prosper in the highly specialized sectors like servers, embedded and HA/HP clusters, and bring innovation to desktop in its own way, neither trying to copy whatever gimmick Mac or Windows offers just for the sake of being all too familiar to users with different platform backgrounds. After all, it has many gimmicks of its own.
The only good thing Canonical did by bringing in the crowd who assume Linux==Ubuntu is that the quality of device drivers started moving up from "dead" to "usable" and continues to improve. But making all other distibutions Ubuntu-like, to me, is a nightmare.
Only grouped buttons have the depressed look. The active button is raised while the other buttons are depressed. Only one button can be active at any one time, so it actually makes sense.
Like you said, if it's all optionally installed, why not include them for people who do need them ? They still give you Xcode on the media with every new Mac given to consumers and let's face it, installing Xcode does not make you a Mac/iPhone programmer.
The consumer doesn't benefit from Xcode, yet there it is. That's why I say your argument of "dumbing down" makes no sense. If anything, they will remove the features because they are wanting to step away from entreprise deployment, not for any perceived benefits to consumers.
Exactly, the Linux crowd does things not for the common good or to gain market share, they primarly do things to scratch their own itch. If that itch happens to be plaguing others, then they get help. Gnome, KDE, they're both very good environnements with tons of features. They can replace OS X or Windows any day, but the people making these projects just don't care to go through the effort of marketing the product they made. They made it for themselves and they're quite happy using what they made.
I actually liked KDE 4.6 (tested it out on a VM in my Mac, Virtual Box did an amazing job giving the VM access to the 320M for hardware accelerated compositing) after 4.0 had completely turned me off.
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Oh yeah, I can understand why. It does make sense, It's just the exact opposite of how it is now
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Do you worry about wether an app is "open" or "closed" in iOS? No. Apple wants the same for OS X.
I doubt Steve would fix something that works most of the time. This is not where money is, after all.
It's just damn too much work. Too many measurements to redo from the ground up. Remember, Macs to this day assume, UI-wise, that the screen is 72 dpi. It was so for quite a long time (all Classic versions can tell), and I doubt that there are enough resources in Apple alone to leave everything and redesign the UI.
And now consider how many 3rd-party apps are going to look broken after the change. I mean, most of them are pixel-oriented.
If you fail to see why they don't fix it, I invite you to answer to my question above: given that the final image is rasterized, and that a video card talks in pixels and bitmaps, how are you going to deal with a dual display setup with different pixel densities per display, and a window is half on one display and half on another? I, for one, don't see an acceptable solution for today's graphics cards which would not require CPU loads way above acceptable limits.
Hello???
Finally someone gets it!...you all are so intensely nitpicking the details you fail to see the direction Apple is going...one step away from touchscreen iMacs, then the laptops!
When apple replaced my laptop w/new MacBook Pro last April with the included inertial scroll enabled touchpad, I had no idea I would stop using my mouse! (I have a second monitor). This is a nice improvement, but touchscreens on all macs (and Apple displays for MacPros) are in the not-too-far-forward future
Anyone that complains about this doesn't have an iPhone or iPad. The future of computing will be all touchscreen devices. (Note: I am typing this w/a bluetooth keyboard connected to my iPad, so I'm not saying input devices won't continue to be useful).
(and that music was awful)
Finally someone gets it!...you all are so intensely nitpicking the details you fail to see the direction Apple is going...one step away from touchscreen iMacs, then the laptops!
When apple replaced my laptop w/new MacBook Pro last April with the included inertial scroll enabled touchpad, I had no idea I would stop using my mouse! (I have a second monitor). This is a nice improvement, but touchscreens on all macs (and Apple displays for MacPros) are in the not-too-far-forward future
Anyone that complains about this doesn't have an iPhone or iPad. The future of computing will be all touchscreen devices. (Note: I am typing this w/a bluetooth keyboard connected to my iPad, so I'm not saying input devices won't continue to be useful).
(and that music was awful
)
Actually, yes I do. I've noticed my battery goes down a lot faster on my iPhone if I don't clean out the "Task manager, yet not really a task manager, maybe just a list of recent apps, or running apps, or suspended apps, or whatever" occasionally.
And I very much care on my Mac what runs. When I come to work and plug it in, Skype needs to be shut down, so does my Torrent client, iTunes and MSN. If they are running, they trip the IDS here at work and I get nastygrams from Security.
Finder not always active in Lion?
This may have been mentioned already, but it appears the Finder may not always be active in Lion.
From the description of AirDrop: "When youre done with AirDrop, close the Finder and your Mac is no longer visible to others."
Then, look at the screenshots of Lion: Finder isn't active in any of them.
I compared those shots to Apple's screen shots of Snow Leopard and, indeed, they show the Finder as active.
This may have been mentioned already, but it appears the Finder may not always be active in Lion.
From the description of AirDrop: "When youre done with AirDrop, close the Finder and your Mac is no longer visible to others."
Then, look at the screenshots of Lion: Finder isn't active in any of them.
I compared those shots to Apple's screen shots of Snow Leopard and, indeed, they show the Finder as active.
That's because the concept of whether an app is open or closed is gone in Lion.
Do you use Skype? That's the only app I've noticed that kills battery life if it's open and you're online.
Interesting point. With iOS, as long as an app doesn't have a task running, it is suspended. If you're offline in Skype and you aren't downloading any torrents, those apps would probably be suspended in OS X. Would that trip your work security?
At any rate, I'm sure there will be some way to kill an app with a pseudo-task manager like in iOS (without resorting to Activity Monitor), if you need to.
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Yes I do, I constantly am closing apps on my iPod Touch else, it starts freaking out...
Also
Hell no to that, I will definitely not use Lion if that's the case...
Contrary to popular views, the GNOME desktop is already ready to be deployed in the enterprise. It had cost lots of Novell/Ximian money, but they have managed to do it right. I use GNOME, and I can tell. Your average corporate drone won't notice the difference most of the time, and the only thing he or she is going to see is that the DE and applications mostly behave even better.
Unfortunately, KDE fails to meet any sane consistency and reliability requirements since 4.0. They put in lots of knobs no one would need most of the time, and the only difference between 4.x and 3.5 was that in 3.5, the knobs actually worked.
Also if I wanted a full multi-touch OS X I'd get a iPad... I don't want that kind of crap on my computer, I use my iPod Touch for that stuff, and when I'm at my computer I expect it to run like a computer not an "i" device...
Plus whats with Apple's new thing with no color at all?!?! All gray iTunes, all gray finder...
Plus whats with Apple's new thing with no color at all?!?! All gray iTunes, all gray finder...
I hate the new mail...uggghhh... I wish there's an option to revert back to the old one, again ughhhh...
yeah absolutely rubbish what the hell is that?
yeah absolutely rubbish what the hell is that?
But again, that's what makes KDE awesome. There's plenty of Knobs and options to make it do what you want it to do. That's the itch they were scratching. I've used the thing from version 1.0 and onwards and always loved it.
And in 4.6, most of the "knobs" work now, and most of the missing 3.5 features are back, or I wouldn't have liked it. Anyway, these days I'm feeling nostaligic, my Linux VM uses Enlightenment DR16 with Eterm and fake transparency. Ahhh, the good old days.
Gnome has always felt "bleh" to me. GConf was a big "wtf" moment for me, reproducing the most disgusting Windows feature. Miguel De Icaza is just a Microsoft junky.
"Freaking out?" I don't close anything (except for Skype, which does kill battery life) with the little red X and I'm fine. What apps do you use?
Somewhere else it was reported that the reverse scrolling is in fact optional.
I agree. I like all the GUI tweaks except for this one. Steve's reasoning was that it emphasizes your content, which is reasonable in theory but in actuality it makes it more difficult to recognize and quickly click on something in the sidebar.
Luckily it's an easy fix, though.
Well, Gconf/dconf is an array of XML files, just like ~/Library/Preferences on your Mac is. What I like GNOME for is that HIG enforcement is good more often than not. And that it does not have often-crashing Akonadi with MySQL behind it. In KDE 3.5.10, Kontact was the best thing since sliced bread to stay current, and Kate was the best thing since Emacs.
Maybe I'll revisit these opinions, installing KDE 4.6 now.
By the way, KDE 4.6 almost works on Mac OS X, except that crash rates are unacceptably high.