By request, this is a cross post from my personal blog. Source is linked at the end of the post.
Help, my MacBook has been iOSified. 36 hours since installing Lion, here’s my quick thoughts.
1. Installed without incident on my MacBookPro, my wife’s MacBook and our MacMini. I grabbed the installer image to copy to a flash drive so I only needed to download once. All-in-all, I was happy with the download/install process.
2. On a Mac portable with the clickable trackpad, if you have an iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch, stick with the default gestures. It’ll be rough for the first couple of days but after that, your vertical & horizontal scrolling will be back to second nature. Before installing Lion, I hadn’t even realized that the iPad/iPhone gestures were opposite.
3. My 2.0ghz Core 2 Duo MacMini (The MediaCenter) upgraded without a hitch and is working swimmingly. My MacMini is over 3 years old and at that age when I start thinking about upgrading. New Minis are out and the benchmark stats are out of this world.
4. Geek feature I love? The PDF signature function in preview. Sign your signature on a piece of paper, hold up to iSight cam, click “okay.”
5. Quicktime screen recording now has options to target a window or screen area instead of the full screen. Excellent for screencasts.
6. Still hate dashboard no matter how pretty the wrapping paper. Same goes with Launchpad. It works on iDevices, but I’m a Spotlight Jedi so it gets in my way.
7. The *new* implementation of Space. Cool. Much more natural than *old* Spaces and seemingly easier to use.
8. Safari 5.1 is smoking. Javascript performance much improved. Reading List is nice, but I’m too ingrained in Instapaper, and more recently, Springpad. Plus I can take both of those with me when I’m mobile. Love that Safari now integrates with your Google and Yahoo accounts. I’ve been living in the Chrome browser world for a while; I’m interested to see where Chrome goes with Lion-aware builds.
9. I love the added features to Screen Sharing. Observe Only mode, you know, for parenting purposes.
10. AirDrop. A.K.A Air-mother-f’ing-Drop. I have an ad-hoc home network that lacks a centralized server and relied on a flash drive sneakernet for *most* of my home file sharing. I still want a centralized server (my old MacMini maybe), but for my immediate future, the problem/need is solved.
11. FileVault 2 – I just set up a portable drive with TrueCrypt, I’m likely going to switch to FileVault. I’ll have more to say about this in a future post once I play around with it.
12. I’m still not sold on the iOSing of everything. I miss the scroll bars for some reason. I also dislike the change to the sidebar when you are in a Finder window, but I probably just need to play around with Preferences to get back to something more comfortable.
13. I also don’t like how everything is becoming simplified and trying to get the OS out of the way for users. Maybe I’m just becoming an old fuddy duddy, but there are times I like the hardware/software to get in my way. Lion is obviously a bridge to unify the Apple world, but the next couple iterations will be interesting to see where Apple sees things going. I’ll bit my tongue for now.
Things I haven’t used:
1. Address book – I’m tied to my Google account and a couple web-based CRMs for nearly all of my contacts.
2. Mail – I’m in the browser, Gmail, Yahoo, Google Apps. Gmail and Google Apps accounts are backed up to cloud and the MacMini.
3. AppleScript and Automater – one day…been saying that for years.
4. iChat – Too ingrained in Google Chat within Gmail/Google Apps
As for the rest of the features, they are mostly fluff for me and as long as they don’t get in my way, I could care less.
Cross posted from my personal blog: 36 Hours with Lion