i'm not surprised, it's on gizmodo after all. the mother of gadget gossip. they write any BS for ad revenue just like they published the freaking article for the 4th time already on facebook. one day they love something, the next day they suddenly hate it for the same reason they loved it before. no credibility at all
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Gizmodo: negative review of Lion... thoughts?
- Thread starter brijazz
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First off, it should be noted that these aren't actual criticisms, but question marks. The whole "Back to my Mac" keynote constantly referred to bringing the iOS experience to the desktop and theres legitimate reasons for why people aren't so quick to accept that as "benefitting" a desktop OS.
But as for the "touch based experience" being discussed, then Launchpad is the more obvious one that unecessarily brings in a mobile launcher to a desktop system, and The trackpad is another. Trackpad and gesture control changes that are meant to feel "natural" since it emulates using a touch screen but without actually having a touch interface then it seems an odd time to tell users to consider changing how things work.
And also, the explanation of "Full Screen Apps" to be more like iOS because for some reason Apple believes it's now confusing to be multitasking on a computer. I'm not one who hates Mission Control, but I do feel that it's not better than Expose/Spaces, BUT it's exactly what should be on iOS devices because it works similar to the WebOS card organization and would be more intuitive if it was touch based.
Again, these arent attacks because one benefit of desktop OS's is that they are still fairly customizable so many of the complaints people make can be avoided or settings can be changed. But the problem people have isnt necessarily the individual changes, but the direction and reasoning behind it. OS X is good and iOS is good, but combining them doesn't make it Great. (Unless they make a touch capable Air. Then I'm all rah rah behind MacOSXiOS.
(BTW. I'm not a Lion hater and Ill be glad to get it on my new MBA next week. But I do see how some of these changes will affect a workflow and not necessarily for the better so that's makes me question Apples decisions.)
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Perhaps if Apple had released a COMPUTER interface rather than a tablet-wannabe interface people wouldn't be quite as disappointed.
Wow. "Lion is being dumbed down to be more like iOS" is gaining the same traction as last year's "iPad is just a big iPod touch." Both share the trollish charm that they are basically true at some level, just not in the ways that are being implied.
well a mac isnt a regular "computer" with click click click. they come with a "touchpad" and those gestures in Lion r meant and work just fine with it. i dont get the hate for the "touch based lion interface" and the sudden assumption that the regular user won't be able to work with it, the macbook has been shipped with a touchpad for years now, nothing new.
That isn't strictly true. Only the laptops come with trackpads or as you call them touch pads. None of their desktop computers come with them as standard although you can choose the Apple Track Pad as an option on BTO systems on their web site or buy it separately as an option.
Lion is very hit or miss for me. Some things I love and some things I hate. I have a new MBA and see no difference in performance or battery life.
I must add I hate the new iCal with a hate that runs very deep in my veins.
I must add I hate the new iCal with a hate that runs very deep in my veins.
They do have a point. Is there really a need for tons of ways to do it? you can Cmd+Tab, Expose, click from the Dock and now Launchpad. I would've rather seen the Cmd+Tab and Expose combined somehow because as it is, Cmd+Tab isn't particularly useful (though quick) because it shows no info about the programs themselves.
Where Launchpad fails is that it hogs the whole screen and there is absolutely no way to interact with anything else. You can arrange apps and launch them, nothing else. It also doesn't let you uninstall anything but apps downloaded from the App Store, which is just ridiculous. It also poses arbitrary limits to how many apps you can have in a folder, which also makes little sense considering that computer displays are not the same as tiny tablet or phone screens.
I still don't see how multiple ways of control is bad. what you described is essentially Mission Control.
Vista was beaten to death way more than it needed to be. The problems with it were blown out of proportion. It actually runs quite good on pretty old hardware. Much older hardware than lion or snow leopard are supported on. What happened with it is many manufacturers were putting extra crap on it and in the first month driver support was poor. Microsoft addressed the problems with manufacturers loading stuff by putting stricter requirements for system images on OEM copies especially with windows 7 and later copies of vista. However within a few months it caught up and performance of it was great. However apples ads pretty much ruined its reputation and they downright exaggerated just about everything. Also the user interface of vista is actually incredibly consistent. All the wizards follow the new format and they all look similar. Say what you want about it but vista runs better on 1gb of ram than Lion does. I have tested both with this amount of ram. People fail to realize how much of vista was brand new. The driver module for gpus, WDDM, was completely new and a gigantic improvement, vastly superior to XP's and Mac OS X's, runs outside of the kernel in userspace now which is why vista and 7 can switch graphics completely on the fly without even logging out. If its crashes which is rare the screen goes black for a sec and the driver restarts. If a driver crashes in XP or Mac it cause a BSOD or Kernel panic respectively. It allows scheduling of direct x and open gl which allows multiple directx and opengl application to run concurently without a large performance penalty. The entire windows shell was pretty much rewritten, Explorer shares very little with its XP equivalent. UAC is more than just a pop up box. There is a ton with it regarding virtualized directories and registries and how it chooses to elevate privileges. Also it pushed software makers to adhere to permission properly. Pretty much every software now i capable of running without admin privileges now. They only time you see the popups today are when you install software, which is also true in mac as they require you to enter a password to make changes to system directories or settings. I just figured I'd address a lot of the ignorance regarding the development of windows vista.
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That was a nice well thought out elaboration of Vista Technicalities but it still goes against what most users and reviewers reported, in masses. Vista was a flop, which is why M$ remolded it into something more like Mac OS X, a la Win 7
Yeah but Vista was a flop largely because of the ignorant media, and also because of those terrible ads Apple ran which basically amounted to outright lies, and MS chose to never respond. People hated Vista without even trying it. So the perception was that Vista was terrible, but it really wasn't.
XP was a "disaster" when it first released too. Now people refer to it as some kind of gold standard.
Not so true. Everyone I know who upgraded to Vista went back to XP. A lot of people had some serious issues with Vista, whether they upgraded their current machine or purchased a new one with it already installed. Remember Tom's Hardware initial benchmarks of Vista?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Windows_Vista
Im not saying everyone had problems but obviously a lot of people did. Why else would the "Switch to Mac" campaign have been so successful?
Yeah Apple used good marketing but they were only capitalizing on the flop that M$ created.
Those initial benchmarks were lower because the drivers weren't mature yet. You could install the initial rtm of vista today and use the drivers out now and get much better scores probably better than xp. And if you did it on SP2 you could get even higher scores. The reason windows 7 didn't have these problem on launch is because the driver module from vista was carried over so the drivers had already had 3 years to mature. Vista was a gigantic change in the way that windows did things, (most functions moved from the kernel to userspace) which is why vista had a rough start, however most people never gave it a chance and many people had an opinion of it even though they never used it.
It was more than just driver issues. Bugs galore, the new "security" system AKA please retype your password 400 times, the list goes on. Even M$ admitted these problems a few years ago when they rushed Win7 out the door.
There's a reason the term "Vista" is a synonym for fail and its ridiculous that some people on here are comparing Lion to that sorry mess of code. At least Apple delivers polished products.
More ways to do the same thing results in more confusion and unnecessary choices for the user. Mission Control combines Spaces and Expose. Cmd+Tab is still the fast way for app switching but it lacks finer control (like which window to select which Expose does). I feel it could be combined with Mission Control as a keyboard based app switcher.
In any case Cmd+Tab and Expose are still pretty natural ways to handle app switching. Spotlight search or clicking an app in Finder/Dock is also easy to understand for launching apps. Then along comes Launchpad which doesn't fit in with the UI at all and works like something that uses a touchscreen. But there is no touchscreen, thus it fails as a user interface. Either offer one easy to understand way to do things or several that work as a coherent whole.
Vista had good foundations but very few actual user interface improvements and several things that were just huge annoyances to the user like the constant UAC prompts. The rest of the user interface was essentially XP, which is and has always been a huge piece of crap. Eventually it became a huge piece of crap which computers had no trouble running. It is an awful operating system on many fronts. Win7 fixed much of that and is quite nice to use though still far from perfect.
Vista also had bad marketing to pull it down. MS's way too optimistic minimum specs resulting in the bad performance rap it got, the gazillion different versions etc. On my system (a rather good Core2Duo desktop at the time) it did actually run faster than XP, especially after the first service pack.
Launchpad is basically the Applications Stack? how is this confusing? If you already know the conventional methods stick with those. But more than likely any new Mac user will play with the dock icons first and find Launchpad before they discover any other methods. And Launchpad is pretty basic and easy to understand.