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What we know about Mac OS X Lion

71 points| shawndumas | 15 years ago |arstechnica.com | reply

43 comments

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[+] eggbrain|15 years ago|reply
>scrolling now works as it does on iOS devices--drag up on the trackpad to scroll down, drag down to scroll up--complete with "rubber-band" effects at the end of scrollable areas.

This doesn't make sense to me from a design sense. With an iPhone or iPad, your finger was touching the screen, so it emulated real "dragging" content down to where you could see it. With a computer however, there's a disconnect between the screen and your fingers, which makes it not as intuitive. Combine this with a few years of two finger scrolling being the exact opposite, and I feel like this will kind of be a pain to get used to.

[+] ugh|15 years ago|reply
I think that there is conceptually no superior way of scrolling. One is as good as the other. Traditionally you dragged the scroll bar, in Lion you drag the page, one makes about as much sense as the other.

What is a problem is that everyone is used to dragging the scroll bar, not the page but I’m not sure whether that’s going to be a big problem. I tried it and my brain already flipped for vertical scrolling after an hour or so. (I still get horizontal scrolling wrong.)

[+] seabee|15 years ago|reply
It's worse than that. One finger dragged up moves the cursor up, two fingers dragged up scrolls the window... down? Is it really sensible to be internally inconsistent?

It also runs counter to scroll wheels on mice, which has a physical reason for the direction too.

[+] glhaynes|15 years ago|reply
I'd wondered whether they would eventually make that change. I haven't tried it yet but I'm sure interested to. It seems like it may make sense with the iOSification of content/scroll views in Lion — they've added smooth pinch-to-zoom and rubber-band scrolling (where it lets you scroll past the bounds of an item with increasing tension until it snaps back when you let go), so maybe it "feels right" in use. I don't know.
[+] mediamaker|15 years ago|reply
i scroll down a lot more than up, worried for my wrist, carpal tunnels
[+] vertr|15 years ago|reply
This can be turned off with one checkbox in the touchpad settings, which I did immediately.
[+] 1001100|15 years ago|reply
Versions is nice. After you first save the file every subsequent manual save creates a version. There are consequently not only the automatic hourly versions.

The UI is a bit clunky, though. OS X switches to a fullscreen Time Machine view which felt way too jarring to me.

The locking behavior is also very well thought out. Additionally to automatically locking documents after two weeks, Lion also (better) exposes this functionality in the UI. All this helps to make it much less likely that you will ever accidentally overwrite an old document you used as a template. (When you start editing a locked document a dialog pops up telling you that the document is locked and the default option is not unlock but duplicate which is great.)

[+] niels_olson|15 years ago|reply
How is this going to interact with git and versions (the svn client)? What about my mediawiki install that versions every article already? How deep does this new Versions go?
[+] xbryanx|15 years ago|reply
What we know about Mac OS X Lion: That it will almost certainly break all the tools you need to run a local web development environment and be a pain to upgrade, but after a few months of weird hacks will go back to being a fabulous working environment for programmers.
[+] tofumatt|15 years ago|reply
Really? Most of the standard web dev stuff (Ruby, PHP, Apache, etc.) comes out of the box and works quite well, and if you need either specialized versions of things (rvm, virtualenv, custom Apache, etc.) or stuff that doesn't come with OS X (lighttpd, node.js, etc.) wouldn't it be installed in /usr/local?

I don't think this will break many web dev tools. Unless you mean stuff like Sequel Pro or TextMate; even then, I can't imagine most apps won't make the transition smoothly.

[+] moe|15 years ago|reply
Oh, they rewrote finder again.

About time, considering the trainwreck that is the Snow Leopard version.

Please, dear god, make that apple finally created something that lets me browse my files as fast again as it was on my Amiga 500 in 1988. Clocked at 7.09 MHz. On floppy disks. I'm sure my 2 GHz machine can do this. It must be possible.

[+] ugh|15 years ago|reply
Well, it looks different. I very much doubt that they changed much of the internals – the Finder just was completely rewritten in Cocoa for Snow Leopard.

When is the Finder slow for you? I never had problems with a slow Finder.

[+] niels_olson|15 years ago|reply
I had massive problems with finder. Then I de-installed all sync apps (dropbox, zumodrive, etc) and it's as snappy as any other program now. I will say, zumodrive was a bear to completely un-install. 3 or 4 deep hooks in the system as I recall, and finding one didn't obviously point me to any of the others. I reinstalled dropbox and still don't have problems. Never re-installed the others, so I don't know which one it was.
[+] pkamb|15 years ago|reply
For someone who's tried it, how broken is the new Expose? Grid view in Snow Leopard was bad enough...
[+] 1001100|15 years ago|reply
The grid gone, at least for now. Exposé (now a part of Mission Control) returns more or less to its old behavior. Windows are resized proportionally and no more arranged in a grid. Quicklook continues to work and Exposé now stacks the windows of one application together. It is no longer possible to show minimized windows in Exposé. The dock is still displayed but clicking on an icon no longer displays the windows of that app in Exposé, OS X will just switch immediately to that app (the normal dock behavior).

The Dashboard, all spaces and all fullscreen apps are displayed along the top of the Exposé view. It’s now possible to change the background image for each space individually but no longer possible to arrange Spaces in a grid (there is always a row of spaces). Clicking on a space in Exposé displays all its windows in Exposé mode. The bird’s-eye view of only the spaces is gone but you can drag windows in Exposé from one space to another. The arrow key Spaces shortcuts also allow you to switch to the Dashboard or fullscreen apps.

[+] conesus|15 years ago|reply
If you're interested in getting Leopard's old-style exposé back in Snow Leopard, I wrote a blog post explaining how to do it: http://www.ofbrooklyn.com/2011/01/9/old-style-mac-os-x-leopa...

Proportional-style windows make so much more sense than the grid-based layout. I'm thrilled that they've reverted back to that for Lion's exposé, using the grid for the new Mission Control view.

[+] sashthebash|15 years ago|reply
Could they please not make everything gray scale like the new iTunes?!
[+] pmjordan|15 years ago|reply
Considering they're rolling it out via the app store, does this mean the current preview doesn't actually contain a new kernel, just user space enhancements?
[+] danudey|15 years ago|reply
They're rolling out the installer via the App Store. The Snow Leopard installer was able to run without having to boot off the install media, so presumably Lion's beta installer is doing the same thing.
[+] evilduck|15 years ago|reply
The individual point releases (10.6.x) have rolled out new kernels via Software Update (not every time, but it happens), I see no reason why that can't be done over the App Store.
[+] zv|15 years ago|reply
I wonder if Apple will make iOS applications compatible with Mac. That would bring more applications to Mac
[+] tjmaxal|15 years ago|reply
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