OS X Lion is the best version of Mac OS X to date. It’s fast and stable and it truly feels like an evolutionary step from 10.6. While Apple positioned Lion as iOS brought back to the Mac, I think the reality is OS X was becoming out of date regardless of outside factors, and iOS helped inform what the modern operating system was getting wrong. OS X doesn’t actually feel much like iOS to me. But that’s not a bad thing—iOS is not a desktop operating system and Mac OS is not a mobile operating system. While they share the Unix core that is OS X, they’re specialized in the right ways to serve the user best in that circumstance.
So what did Apple learn from iOS? There seem to be four critical things: Gestures, one application at a time (aka full-screen), memory/open application management simplicity, and linen.
Okay, so number four is a joke (sort of), but you can think of that one as Apple’s new visual style, which propagates its way through Lion.
Gestures
Every interaction with an iOS device is a gesture. When the iPhone came out in 2007, this was a (mostly) unfamiliar concept. People were used to touch screens, sure, but they had never used pinch-to-zoom, had rarely double-tapped or tapped with two fingers at the same time. Four years and millions of iOS devices later, gestures are commonplace and users understand them. And users are, naturally, feeling itchy about the plain old mouse-and-keyboard interface on desktop computers (or, at least, Apple’s betting they are). So Apple went gesture crazy all over Lion’s face.
Swipe up with three fingers to enter Mission Control, swipe to the left to switch between desktops or fullscreen apps. Swipe with two fingers to go back in Safari (this one existed before, but now it’s the opposite direction and does a nice little visual animation… more on this later). Pinch with four fingers and you get Launch Pad. Spread four fingers (there must be a better way to say that) and there’s your desktop. For the most part, these all work just fine. You can’t customize them much (some not at all) and you can’t add new ones (there’s no ‘create a gesture’ support). But overall they’re very welcome and they make Lion easier to use, once you learn them.
If you don’t have a Magic Trackpad, you’re not going to enjoy Lion nearly as much as someone who owns one, though. Lion will probably quadruple Magic Trackpad sales. Here’s a tip: Get a Magic Trackpad and use it in addition to your (Magic) mouse. One on each side of the keyboard. Works wonders.
Full-Screen
I’m not the target audience for this feature, but I know plenty of people who are (people like my wife, for instance). People who tend to focus on one app for long time (browser, email, iPhoto) and would appreciate the distraction-free environment that also removes complexity. The iPhone runs in this mode all the time, obviously, and users have become used to it. It simplifies the interaction model at the loss of general multi-tasking, although one could argue that multi-tasking is still easier in Lion because of the simple gestures to switch between full-screen apps (the iPad has similar features but still feels harder to manage, multi-tasking-wise). It does present its own odd UX issues (you must move your cursor to the top of the screen and wait a moment for the system menu to appear, you must use your mouse to click a button to exit full-screen [thanks to @ntslva who pointed out the ESC key does take you out of full-screen in the released version of Lion], et cetera), but for many people this will be very useful.
Memory/Open application management simplicity
By default in Lion, the Dock will not show you which applications are running. Further, it will automatically quit applications based on certain rules to automatically memory-manage your machine, much like iOS. If you have iTunes open but it’s not on the screen (no visible windows) and you haven’t touched it in two days, OS X might simply quit it in the background when you start that memory-intensive Aperture editing session. This is a bit bothersome to people who like the idea of managing their own applications, but in practice, depending on your machine’s specs, this might not come up too frequently. The bigger issue here is user habit—do you check the Dock to see what’s running before looking for windows on the screen? Many people often do. Not having indicators completely breaks that. It’s also weird.
Linen
iOS is very well designed. It feels truly modern and playful in just the right ways. Sure, there’s way too much linen, but the linen itself looks nice. OS X’s design has felt outdated for years. Those same UI elements designed in 2000 and tweaked in 2004 hadn’t aged particularly well. So Apple took cues from iOS and redesigned most of OS X’s interface elements. What you end up with is a lot of gray and a lot of bluer-blue. Most applications lost color in their small icons. Many are now skeuomorphic. The scrollbars are gone. Most elements look cleaner, although the change wasn’t as radical as it could have been (do we still need traffic lights?).
Launchpad is iOS’s Springboard, nearly verbatim. Mission Control is an evolution of Spaces and Exposé with a huge cup of linen. The OS X login screen is a hybrid of linen, the old login screen, and iOSisms. The new UI elements (buttons, checkboxes and such) are sharper and squarer, reminiscent of iOS’s button style. It’s a fair mix of the two styles and it works pretty well, contrast and skeuomorphic issues aside.
This seems to be as close as we’re going to get to a complete redesign of OS X any time soon. And maybe that’s just fine.
Et Cetera
Aside from these major features, Lion contains tons of small tweaks, additions and removals. Most are not worth mentioning in a huge list, but a few stand out:
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Lion contains a purported 250 new features, and most of them are welcomed additions. For $29, it seems crazy not to upgrade, unless you’ve got an old Mac or you’re holding on to your copy of Quicken for dear life.
There are problems, though. Thankfully, they’re mostly little nagging issues 95% of people won’t notice. But I notice them. And I will chronicle them in nitty-gritty detail soon.
I’ve been using the same core install of OS X since April 30, 2005, the day I received my copy of 10.4 Tiger and did a fresh install on my Power Mac G5. Over the past six years I’ve installed the two subsequent releases of OS X as upgrades (Leopard and Snow Leopard), and planned to do the same with 10.7 Lion when it arrived this month. During those six years, I’ve switched my main computer hardware five times: Power Mac G5 > Power Mac G5 Quad > 17-inch MacBook Pro > 24-inch iMac > 15-inch MacBook Pro > 15-inch MacBook Pro (yes, my last two machines were 15-inch MacBook Pros). In each case, I would remove the hard disk from my new machine, hook it up to my old machine and clone the drive, thus creating an exact version of my old computer in new hardware.
After several attempts in the past to find the ideal hardware setup, I recently settled on the idea of an iMac in the office and a MacBook Air on the go. Over the past year I’ve rarely used my MacBook Pro in anything but clamshell mode, and if I’m not using it portably I’d rather reap the benefits of a stationary machine (more disk space, faster, et cetera). Late last year I upgraded my MacBook Pro’s drive, replacing the stock 7,200 RPM HDD with an OWC MercuryExtreme Pro SSD. It was outrageously expensive, but I spend all day on my computer and I knew it was worth it. But after waiting several months for the drive to ship (due to fulfillment issues), when I finally cloned the old HDD to the SSD and installed it, I wasn’t as thrilled with the speed as I thought I would be. Sure, it was fast, but it wasn’t quite as crazy-fast I had expected based on OWC’s specs.
When the new 27-inch iMac arrived last month, I immediately cloned the SSD in my MacBook Pro over to the new iMac (I ordered the BTO option featuring a 256GB SSD + 1TB HDD) and restarted it. It was fast, but something didn’t seem quite right. Earlier in the day, before cloning, I ran Xbench a few times to see how fast the new machine was, and it was averaging a total score of 460. (I am aware that Xbench isn’t particularly great for testing the speed of machines these days, but it was the only way for me to get a somewhat direct comparison between the iMac and the MacBook Pro.) My MacBook Pro was averaging 270. After I cloned to the new iMac and felt something was off, I ran Xbench again and kept averaging around 270. The same score the MacBook Pro was getting. Something’s wrong with this picture.
I wiped the iMac’s SSD drive and did a fresh install of Snow Leopard, then ran Xbench, and it was averaging 460 again. Figuring this must be something to do with the iMac being a pristine system with no applications or files or configuration, I decided to test the theory and began configuring the machine anew. After every few installations or large chunks of copied data, I ran Xbench. No change—average score of 460.
Eventually, I realized something was funky with my older core OS X install. Whatever it is, it happened—I would assume slowly—over the past six years. Various configurations, application installs, terminal messes… nearly a decade of computing had created a completely bloated and unnecessarily slow machine. That OS X made it so simple and safe to upgrade to each major release, and that Macs made it so simple to clone the entire filesystem onto an entirely new machine was a godsend for computing. But it also made me 100% unwilling to start over. That is, until I started doing it this week and realized just how much bloat there was:
I was also using a lot of tools for no good reason, or in addition to other tools which did the same thing, leading to extra CPU and memory usage.
I decided when setting up the new machine that I would only install something if I needed it. The initial pass of application installs was limited to essentials—Adobe apps (Photoshop, Illustrator and Lightroom), Xcode et al, TextMate, Dropbox, Sparrow, Skype, Propane and Reeder. I started using the iMac for real work and slowly installed other apps I needed. Did some web work—installed CSSEdit, Transmit and Google Chrome. Needed to share a screenshot with the other guys at Karbon—installed Cloud App. Wanted to get at my upcoming calendar events easier—installed Fantastical. Needed to access my television Mac Mini from the new iMac—installed ScreenSharingMenulet. As I went along, I realized a few things could be combined or improved as well:
After a full week of slowly adding only what I need, I’ve got a completely usable machine. I’m sure more installations will occur, but I’m going to try to hold myself accountable and only install what I need. If I try software and don’t use it after a few days, I’m going to zap it (I also installed AppZapper). And guess what? The Xbench score is still 460.
A few fun tidbits about this machine:
It was a bit painful to start fresh, but the advantages are immediately noticeable. A faster, cleaner machine that’s easier to get work done on.
Speaking of the fall of TinyGrab, I just came across FileShuttle, which nearly completely solves my needs. It uploads to the S/FTP server of your choice, it’s free, and it will automatically upload screenshots and copy the URL to the pasteboard.
There’s only one problem, and that’s that it shows a dock icon and no menubar extra. This isn’t the end of the world, however. To get around this:
Now the app’s dock icon will be hidden but it will still work. Because there’s no menubar extra, you won’t see a visible progress when your file is uploading, but it only takes a second or two usually so I just take a screenshot, wait a moment, then paste the newly copied URL. Hopefully, in the future, this app will have a menubar extra, but for now this works quite well. RIP, TinyGrab.
The guys over at TinyGrab are running a clinic on how not to handle a crisis.
A few weeks ago, TinyGrab’s servers were apparently hacked, and because of that they released new, untested software that completely doesn’t work. This makes no sense. They claim that due to someone accessing and “corrupting the kernel” (really?) of their servers, they had to completely abandon TinyGrab 1.0’s server-side codebase, as well as completely invalidate the client applications immediately.
I’m not sure I understand why this was necessary at all. If your server gets hacked you undo the damage, repair the codebase from your repository, increase/modify security, patch any holes, and you’re back to the races. If your client application needs modifications because of changes to security on the server-side, issue an update through regular channels. This could be done and solved in relatively quick time, depending on how much code needed to be updated. You can even force users to reset their passwords if necessary.
Instead, TinyGrab threw a perfectly functional client app away entirely, they removed all of their 1.0 code on the server, and they released new 2.0 versions of their client applications which aren’t at all production ready. The Mac version of the app doesn’t support even half of the functionality of the 1.0 app, and the website is a complete shambles. Most people cannot log in (including myself), and it’s total garbage.
Here’s the ridiculous thing: I paid for the TinyGrab “premium” features (a one-time unlock fee) so that I could use FTP support and have my screenshots uploaded to my own server. Guess what feature is completely missing from TinyGrab 2.0? That’s right—FTP uploads. So when TinyGrab switched over to this new, shitty client app, they completely removed the only feature I use. Well, that’s helpful!
Grab a Snickers
While I prefer Milky Way bars, I appreciate the little joke Dropbox shows when syncing time will be long.
We’re Supposed to be on Rollercoasters
Good to see that iChat’s video chat feature where you can appear in front of digital backgrounds still works just as poorly as it did when it launched.
I’ve been waiting for something like this for years. The single worst part of using a MacBook Pro as your primary computer, and going from using a Cinema Display to the laptop alone, is that windows in OS X are absolutely terrible about retaining their locations and sizes. Windows will frequently jump to random places, half off the screen, it’s horrible.
For many years I have been complaining to anyone who will listen that Apple should be solving this problem directly in OS X, especially since a majority of Apple’s customers are laptop users. This issue continues to be ignored, however.
Enter Stay.app, which allows you to store desired locations of windows for all applications in multiple states (laptop screen only, plus external display, external display only) and the app can automatically switch between them when the display setup changes. In addition, you can use Stay.app to restore window positions even without changing your display arrangement.
I couldn’t get my credit card out fast enough for this purchase.
