Lion Impressions: The Day After

I’ve had Lion on my main machine for over a day now, and I wanted to share my first impressions during the “honeymoon” phase. As I continue to work with the big cat, I’m sure my reflections will adjust, but in the meantime, here are my thoughts:

1. Screen sharing in Lion is a major step-up over Snow Leopard. While the option of sharing my screen with my local desktop has always existed, Lion now brings the ability of having the shared screen occupy its own “Space”. This is a welcome boon for anyone who uses screen sharing on a regular basis.

2. The ‘natural scrolling’ motif that Lion introduced is counter-intuitive when you’re not directly interacting with the screen (like on a typical iOS device). Thankfully, there’s an option to revert back to a 27-year old paradigm I’m already accustomed to.

3. In the “Somewhat Annoying” department, the Magic Trackpad is not directly recognized by the OS until you visit the System Preferences to ‘synch’ it. You won’t be able to use your trackpad with the Lion Restore partition, either. Good thing I have a wired input device nearby.

4. The Lion Install app will disappear after you install it. If you’re planning on making a bootable Lion DVD, you have to do it before you run the installer.

5. You can make a clean install of Lion onto another volume pretty easily. Just point the Lion installer to the volume you want to install Lion onto, and it will do it (no voodoo required.)

6. Launching an Adobe app (like Photoshop or Flash) after installing Lion will prompt the installation of Java components. It’s nothing to get alarmed about, but it seemed noteworthy to report on.

7. While I’m not a fan of the color-devoid Finder sidebar, I do appreciate the larger image previews when looking at files in Column View.

8. In my last post, I mentioned that HyperSpaces does not work with Lion. Interestingly enough, some of HyperSpaces’ features are now baked in Lion directly. For example, you can now assign a specific desktop wallpaper to each space.

9. For Power Users, Mission Control and Launchpad seem like a solution to a nonexistent problem. I prefer the old Spaces implementation, myself.

10. Dashboard is still useless. At least now it’s in its own Space (this can be disabled, too).

11. Speed-wise, Lion feels very responsive. As does the new version of Safari.

All in all, Lion’s a solid release. I had no problems* with the install whatsoever – and daresay, it was the easiest install of Mac OSX I’ve ever encountered.

*Make sure to have back-ups on hand, as a standard precautionary measure.

-Krishna

Krishna July 21, 2011