Lion Reviews Are Out: 'Great Value', 'Shakes Things Up', 'Very Few Bugs'

[Jwhitehead333]

Im loving Lion, Full screen apps is awesome, there is no more distractions!!!
The multitouch gestures are also cool/handy.
I have come across a couple bugs, but nothing that would stop me wanting It as an OS.

 

[pfml07]

but why?

I have so many questions about Lion and the direction Apple seem to want to head in.

I don't know why they feel that they must integrate so much iOS into their computer OS. I mean they are two completely different things.
I can honestly say that right now i am not using misson control or launchpad
There are much quicker ways to access things

Loved Leopard, Loved Snow Leopard even more, not really fussed on Lion
I can't really see the features that make it so fantastic.
With Leopard to Snow Leopard you could feel the difference when you upgraded, now not so sure.

I must admit that as a windows fan I like to have apps fill the screen and with full screen apps that is a good send for me personally

I like Apple, but I think it's time to spend a bit more time working on OS X and not iOS. iOS is great, we know that. It Sells. but if Apple wanna take the computer market off Microsoft they need to look at a different user base and start to cater for people that aren't just design professionals!

 

[Frobozz]

The multi-touch gestures combined with Mission Control and full-screen apps are, without question, my favorite user facing feature os OS X. Ever. Finally, the simplicity from iOS brought to a more capable platform.

 

[mcmlxix]

Yahoo Mail now supported on IMac, always was with iPad.

Do you mean Yahoo Mail supported by the OS X mail.app pre Lion? It always worked for me. Account setup in the new mail.app is more automated now. Maybe that's it.

 

[Stella]

I don't know why they feel that they must integrate so much iOS into their computer OS. I mean they are two completely different things.
I can honestly say that right now i am not using misson control or launchpad
There are much quicker ways to access things

Loved Leopard, Loved Snow Leopard even more, not really fussed on Lion
I can't really see the features that make it so fantastic.
With Leopard to Snow Leopard you could feel the difference when you upgraded, now not so sure.
but if Apple wanna take the computer market off Microsoft they need to look at a different user base and start to cater for people that aren't just design professionals!

Snow Leopard was my favourite OSX, it was solid.

Definitely - some functionality of iOS definitely needs NOT to cross over to OSX, such as Launchpad - its a mess on OSX and feels out of place. Needs refining.

OSX Lion is aimed towards the casual user / iOS crowd - Apple have catered for non design professionals for a while now, but this is more obvious with Lion.

 

[Frobozz]

Loved Leopard, Loved Snow Leopard even more, not really fussed on Lion
I can't really see the features that make it so fantastic.
With Leopard to Snow Leopard you could feel the difference when you upgraded, now not so sure.

Hmmm. I had the opposite reaction. I guess everyone's different, but I immediately saw the workflow improvements and usability changes in Lion. Snow Leopard's changes were almost invisible to me. It really didn't have a lot of user-facing features. The speed improvements were not really impressive, either. Lion, on the other hand, has a lot of immediate value. I can't wait until more apps use auto-save.

To your point concerning iOS integration with a desktop OS-- there's good reason. Primarily, Apple is a company that looks to reduce the interface between the computer and a human to the simplest analog. Touch and gestures are natural and, in some cases, time savers. Apple doesn't want you using F keys and other discreet keys or clicks to do things that would seem otherwise intuitive physically. So for pinching to shrink the thing you look at (to reveal the thing behind it), just take a piece of paper and do the same thing on your desk. They are trying to make people's natural inclinations, based on their experiences with the physical world, more integral to how you use a computer. That plays through to all the physical analogues in apps like the Calendar.

It's a design philosophy, for sure. It's not the ONLY correct answer, either. But you see people get excited about it because, in general, it makes ore sense to new users. (After you've learned a different system, it can be harder to change-- that's just human nature.)

 

[John.B]

I assume Time Machine would work as well? Not that I'm going to try it...

Sure, it accomplishes the same end result.

The issue (I hesitate to call it a "problem") with the Time Machine backup is that it has to be restored, where I can boot into a cloned FireWire drive in about a minute if necessary.

Do you mean Yahoo Mail supported by the OS X mail.app pre Lion? It always worked for me. Account setup in the new mail.app is more automated now. Maybe that's it.

Don't you have to pay for the upgraded mail support to get IMAP access from a Mac or PC? When did that change?

 

[mcmlxix]

I have a question for those who've used Resume.

Safari and Firefox has a similar feature for SL, but my experience of bringing either app up after a crash was that when all of the tabs/windows restored themselves, it took forever and caused those apps to be fairly unusable while it was happening. As a result, I wouldn't use it and relied on my history to reopen any sites that were important to restore.

My concern is that since Resume is systemwide and not limited to one or two apps, that this experience will be more tiresome. Is this true or not?

 

[mcmlxix]

Don't you have to pay for the upgraded mail support to get IMAP access from a Mac or PC? When did that change?

If I remember, there was a site (Yahoo?) that said you did need a premium Yahoo account. But I never did, and IMAP worked.

 

[Frobozz]

OSX Lion is aimed towards the casual user / iOS crowd - Apple have catered for non design professionals for a while now, but this is more obvious with Lion.

So as a design professional, you don't think that gestures have a use on the desktop? Surely you have a Wacom tablet. Surely you learned to draw with a pencil, smudge charcoal drawings with your fingers, and sculpt with clay? I did. If anything, I think Apple is making the day to day chores of people who are visually oriented a lot more intuitive. People need to do less "learning" or a new system. I wish Photoshop and Illustrator had gesture support!

Launch Pad doesn't seem out of place to me, at all. I think the reordering of items seems cumbersome, for sure. But the concept is perfect. I don't need the finder for launching and accessing apps. How many people do you know just placed their application folder in the Dock and set it Grid view? Probably a lot. This is just making that experience full screen and more interactive. It is, after all, called "launch pad" not "Finder."

I'm not saying they got it perfect. I think they pulled too much touch-specific metaphor into launch pad with reordering-- for sure.

 

[Stella]

If you take Lion as a whole, IMO, its obvious that its targetted more towards the casual user than others.

Sure, you can cherry pick features and say why this is useful for other non casual users ( e.g,. your example below ). But look at Lion as an entire package.

BTW - I didn't say the gestures were not useful. I also said "Some iOS functionality" needs not to be on the desktop - i.e., its more suited towards a mobile device than a desktop ( no touch screen for example).

The added gestures are very useful. Its good to see Apple making the touchpad / magic mouse more useful by default.

So as a design professional, you don't think that gestures have a use on the desktop? Surely you have a Wacom tablet. Surely you learned to draw with a pencil, smudge charcoal drawings with your fingers, and sculpt with clay? I did. If anything, I think Apple is making the day to day chores of people who are visually oriented a lot more intuitive. People need to do less "learning" or a new system. I wish Photoshop and Illustrator had gesture support!

 

[ctucci]

I have a question for those who've used Resume.

Safari and Firefox has a similar feature for SL, but my experience of bringing either app up after a crash was that when all of the tabs/windows restored themselves, it took forever and caused those apps to be fairly unusable while it was happening. As a result, I wouldn't use it and relied on my history to reopen any sites that were important to restore.

My concern is that since Resume is systemwide and not limited to one or two apps, that this experience will be more tiresome. Is this true or not?

That was my experience, it got in the way more than it helped, so I disabled it. (preferences, general, it's under there)

 

[hardyja]

Love It but Very Buggy

I love lion!! Lot of really nice features that make things operate really smooth. However, i have had my 15' MBP freeze three times, and once the screen dimmed from top rolling to the bottom and a window popped up saying you need to restart your computer, Something may have gone wrong. Upon restarting it asked to send information about it too Apple, hopefully they can get some updates out.

Sorry Steve- Some things just don't work...right away

 

[Tivoli]

Do you mean "bounce" is gone?

Yes, no bounce in Lion's Mail.
SPAM-tastic

 

[thirteen1031]

Good luck using mission control. Say you want the two desktops to the right to be mail and iTunes, in that order. Good luck. How did this get so screwed up?

I'm confused. You make sure both iTunes and Mail are open and running on the first desk top. You go into mission control. Pull up two new desk tops. #2, #3. Move mail out of #1 into #2. Move iTunes out of #1 into #3. There. You now have two desktops to the right that are mail and iTunes in that order.

Took me 30 seconds. And if I'm not happy with mail and iTunes being on those desktops and want 'em back, open mission control, click on the "X" of #2 and #3 and both mail and iTunes are back in #1. What's the problem?

 

[macsmurf]

IMHO Mission Control has managed to combine fullscreen apps, virtual desktops, and Exposé in a way that would make sense to a lot of people that didn't really get the whole Spaces idea. I think it is an excellent innovation and I don't think I've seen anything like it. We've had virtual desktops for 20 years (and I find the really useful) but this is a really nice way of combining them with other desktop paradigms. It is in every way a desktop innovation and has nothing to do with iOS. Full marks!

I consider Launchpad to be an auxillary dock. It allows me to remove some of the clutter in the dock coming from the apps I only use once in a while and it's slightly easier to use than just clicking into applications.

Launchpad is also a way to manage App Store apps and that can be a bit confusing. If you remove an app from your dock it is still installed. If you remove an app from the Launchpad it is uninstalled. If an app did not come from the App Store you can't remove it so I have a giant "Not used" folder instead. There definitely seem to be room for improvement.

It is pretty obvious that installing apps by downloading as usual and installing from the App Store are two different workflows that are difficult to design a unified GUI around. The same problem exists in Linux distributions and Microsoft will probably run into the same kinds of troubles if they decide to make Windows Update a more generic software managing platform.

On Linux the problem has been "solved" by having package managers that contain almost all the software you will ever need. That way you'll only have a few apps that aren't installed via the manager. It's not really a solution but it works somewhat. The same could be accomplished by Apple but the fact that they want a lot of money to include your app means that the large companies (Microsoft, Adobe, etc.) probably won't ever be in the store with their main products. The prohibition against kexts will keep out products such as VMWare Fusion and Parallels out as well, even if they wanted in.

Also, Apple seem to try to use the App Store in an anticompetitive way. I wonder if Firefox or Chrome would be approved if they applied. Maybe they would but there must be a concern from other companies that if they contribute to make the App Store the only way most users install apps, Apple will abuse it.

The primary problem, as I see it, is that Apple isn't 100% focused on making the best user experience possible. They also want to use their UI to keep out competitors and to make lots of money instead of making them on hardware as they've always done. I think that is a mistake.

 

[David29]

Wtf

So, the point of Lion is to make my Mac act more like a phone?

That's not progress.

 

[brenm666]

Makes me laugh that almost everyone's complaining about Lion. It's only been out for 24 hours guys.
Wait a week and the majority of the bugs are gonna be gone.
Wait a month all almost all the apps you used are gonna be updated and/or you'll find new apps.

Only thing that really bothers me with Lion is the fact that I can't put my Spaces in a square. I used to be able to go to any space with the push of a key...

Edit: another thing too (that is gonna be updated anyway...) but just to let you know that the three fingers swipe in chrome/rockmelt is not working right now.

 

[thirteen1031]

1. I don't care for the leather-bound look for iCal and Address Book

I love 'em! I think they're fun, whimsical, interesting to look at, and personable--I've always loved that about Apple, that it's not all business, all utilitarian. It's fun, too.

 

[frankwrang]

Separate Finder window per Desktop possible?

Is there a way to have a separate Finder window open for each Desktop?

When switching between Desktops either via gestures or via Mission Control, everything moves in smoothly, excluding the finder window. This one pops in after the switch, and it is always the same for all of the Desktops. I would love to have a Finder window per desktop (moving in smoothly with the rest!).

Thanks, F

 

[pondosinatra]

Outside of the look of the new Address Book (and to a lesser degree the new iCal), Lion is looking fantastic.

Is there an option to turn these abominations back to how they looked in SL?

 

[polaris20]

I wasn't expecting much, but had to buy it to test with anyway, since any new Mac we get at the office will have it. All my apps work (VPN, support client, Cisco VoIP, Office 2011, etc) which is obviously a good thing.

Being a heavy user of Spaces (can't live without it, actually), I was expecting to be pretty pissed off by how it's implemented here. However I actually like it better. It's very usable, very easy to move between spaces. How users of other OSes live without this is beyond me.

Speed seems to be on par, nothing extraordinary. However it's always good when it doesn't get slower!

Mail is fantastic; I use it instead of Outlook 2011 (which is buggy for me), and the new version is stellar. Address Book and iCal are kinda hideous, but I don't use them as much, so no biggie.

iChat is great, with the new unified window and tabbed conversations. Very handy when I've got group chats, individual chats, and different accounts all going at the same time. Cleaner, for sure.

Using Dashboard as a separate space felt kinda clunky, so I turned that off. Also turned off the resume feature, and switched the scrolling back to traditional.

One thing to note for corporate users is that since Lion uses SMBX (Apple's own implementation of Microsoft's SMBv2) Lion works much better in a Windows 2008 Server domain environment. Network browsing is improved, and all the machines show up across the network, without the need for a WINS server.

 

[polaris20]

So, the point of Lion is to make my Mac act more like a phone?

That's not progress.

No, the point of it is to increase security (it did), as well as provide a number of UI enhancements (it did), improve Windows networking compatibility (it did), while maintaining great performance (it did).

 

[mcmlxix]

I love 'em! I think they're fun, whimsical, interesting to look at, and personable--I've always loved that about Apple, that it's not all business, all utilitarian. It's fun, too.

I suppose this is a matter of personal taste, but one man's whimsy and fun is another man's faux and juvenile. Let's also not forget Photo Booth. I tend to find such things (as well as much of Apple's advertising tone) a bit saccharine, and not at all in keeping with their minimalist hardware and otherwise increasingly minimalist UI.

 

[wovel]

Being a heavy user of Spaces (can't live without it, actually), I was expecting to be pretty pissed off by how it's implemented here. However I actually like it better. It's very usable, very easy to move between spaces. How users of other OSes live without this is beyond me.

I thought it was just me, I relied heavily on spaces in SL and find the Lion implementation to be a great upgrade.