If I don’t do this, I’ll be very tempted to simply gripe and put big smiley faces on Twitter as I explore Lion. This way, my PC friends don’t have to hear me talk about Lion for 3 hours but those who do care can hear some of my insight into what I think of Lion from the get-go.
I installed Lion at 8AM (as soon as it came out) but spent the day working hard so I only was able to see a few small things. Here are some tweets from today as I explored Lion in between work and meetings:
- Installing Mac OS X Lion. Just ordered a new 11″ MacBook Air with all of the bells and whistles! It’s Christmas!
- Apple now sells the MacBook Air, iPad and Mac mini without an optical drive. Wow.
- Photo: If I had the money right now, I’d buy this setup and I would promise myself that I would keep it as… http://tumblr.com/xpy3lp9i80
- Visit Apple.com/MacBook. Prepare to cry a bit inside. http://bit.ly/okpLzq
- So..Apple releases Lion, attempts to kill off the mouse, kills the MacBook, Kills DisplayPort displays, removes the optical drive in MacMini
- Lion continues to make me smile with every new action that I perform. Newness everywhere. New login window…WHOA!
- How is OS X Lion NOT going to be the Top Paid and Top Grossing App Store App? How long will it be top paid before Apple starts down-voting?
- OMFG WHY DID APPLE MAKE ICAL SO UGLY??!!?!!?!? #Lion.
- iCal = Ugh. However, this heat-map feature is so cool. http://twitpic.com/5t4cz5
- “All My Files” on my MacBook Air looks like this… HA! That’s it. http://twitpic.com/5t7g7z
- Finally playing with Lion after a long day at work and running errands. Mission Control is pointless for most people.
- I NEVER use / liked Dashboard, never used spaces and don’t minimize windows. I hide then Command+Tab. Easy system 12+ apps always open.
- I have custom folders in my Applications Folder. Why do I have to set those up AGAIN in Launchpad?
- I have my Applications folder split into 5 different folders. Apple, Productivity, Adobe, Shareware, Mac App Store. Now, LaunchPad is asking me to restart that process. I can’t drag apps two at a time to folders. It’s one at a time. This isn’t iOS. I HAVE A KEYBOARD!
- On top of all of that, my Applications folder is a mess now. It turns out, you can’t move Apple Applications into their own folders. (/Applications/Apple). There’s an error that says “You can’t move iChat because it’s required by Mac OS X”
- This has caused issues before when I do OS X updates, new versions of files were places in /Applications and I’d just move them to /Apple and replace the old versions. It worked for me because I like organization. I can now just ignore the Applications folder completely I guess and just use LaunchPad. It’s just gonna take FOREVER to setup dragging one app at a time.
- The new scrolling is something I absolutely hate and also I hate the changes to Expose (to mission control) and I hate the LaunchPad UI and the new mail. The new Mail I may be able to get used to. Fortunately, most of the hated features I can change like the scrolling but I’m not going to change it. My feeling is, this will remain optional for now but will just be normal soon and I’ll have to deal with it.
- My advice is to keep the scrolling as default and then get used to it over time.
- Trying everything I can to select more than one app in LaunchPad or integrate two folders by putting one folder on top of the other. Not possible. I can’t get it to work.
- Moving an app from one LaunchPad screen to the next is a 3 second delay. Not instant like on iOS. Uber painful to customize folders on LaunchPad. So painful that I may just wait until the experience improves and not use LaunchPad ever.
- I launch most of my apps from the Dock and Spotlight. Might just continue that.
- Nevermind. I just finally finished LaunchPad work. It took half an hour. Ridiculous. That was a worthless endeavour.
- I’ve noticed that my system has been taxed at 100% for the past hour. I think having all of these apps open in different windows / desktops / spaces is deceiving. I don’t close things as often as I usually do and am almost out of ram.
- It looks like the dotmacsyncservice is still a royal pain in the ass and maxes out my CPU during syncing. For shame.
- AHHHH REVERSE SCROLLING!!!!
- Why does Mail.app still dictate what the default RSS reader is? I had to go there to choose Reeder as my default reader and how often it checks feeds when Reader itself is set to 1 minute, Mail.app only recognizes 30 minute increments. Why was this overlooked?
- Mail preferences have gone mostly unchanged.
- Having Mail open full screen is nice! I have it on its own window. I know I’m against the multiple desktops but a three finger swipe over to Mail is pretty nice. On the 11″ MacBook Air, full screen is fantastic!
- Command+Tab to mail just slides the Mail window over.
- Just changed Finder view preferences to open new Finder windows to my home folder instead of “all my files” Also just removed All My files, Applications, Documents and “AirDrop” from my Finder sidebar. No point in having those things.
- Customizing my Finder window tool bar (via View menu) allows me to add a “burn” button. They just now added this right as they remove optical media from every Mac they sell? Lame.
- Does anyone use CoverFlow mode in the finder? Pretty weak.
- iCal is really driving me insane. A lotof reviewers just say that Apple is making iCal on the Mac look like it does on the iPad. LIES. The iPad version looks much better. This just looks like shit.
- The heatmap feature is so freaking cool! I love seeing that my busiest days are always Wednesday.
- I may have just broken “show availability heat map” in iCal. Opened up a meeting with
Just a quick screenshot dump. Back to the live-blog
This is the 2nd place I’ve seen “burn to disk” as an option, this time it was when I double clicked (right click) on a folder on the desktop. Why so many references to burning? This worked very well!
So, what’s next. Well, About This Mac is nice but what’s up with all of the “Other”?
That’s a hell of a lot of Other. The audio, movies and photos aren’t “content” that I watch. It’s just stuff that I have from my last trip when I only had the MBA with me and I imported a lot of footage from my camera. I should move that to my iMac.
Loving the new file formats in TextEdit. This is NICE!
Before:
After:
- I use Gmail at work at Mail.app at home. Well, I use Outlook at work, but for personal email while on my lunch break, I use Gmail. I’m curius. There’s no easy way to mark just one email in a threaded conversation as unread. Will this make Gmail think 5 items are unread when It’s just one email in a conversation? I have to expand a convo (which isn’t easy) and mark just that one as unread. Painful. Maybe I should just get into the habit of flagging emails instead of marking as unread.
- Luckily, most of the Mail.app key commands still work Shift+Command+D to send as an example. I love key commands. I use them CONSTANTLY.
- OMG ICAL IT BURNS!
- The new OS interface in general is really refined. I’m enjoying it a lot. I’m diving into the utilities folder to see what damage can be done
- Mingler and SyncService have been taking up my full CPU process for hours. Finally killled both of them. Looks MobileMe / Exchange server related. No clue.
- Also, I have an SSD MacBook Air. I delete my Spotlight database each month and it takes about an hour to rebuild it. This morning, without doing anything at all, spotlight said 12 hours remaining. That’s usually the case when I’m using the system quite a bit but I wasn’t. Now, it says 6 hours remaining. 12 full hours to build up the spotlight database? On a MacBook with just apps? Hmmm. Previously, it really was just one hour or 4 hours if I was using the computer. so weird.
- Utilities folder was pretty weak. Moving on.
- WHOA! The play / pause and next / previous song buttons on my MacBook Air keyboard just changed the song in Spotify. I honestly assumed those keys only worked with iTunes. iTunes is running but Spotify was playing music. Very impressive. Is this new?
AHHH!!! Just realized it’s 10PM. Time to read some more articles via Instapaper and go to bed. L8r! Thanks for reading.