Mac OS/X Lion (Out Now)

Arwin

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So far my impressions are quite favorable:

- finally, I can resize windows from all sides and corners! Woohoo.
- I love the iPhone / iOS style Launch pad, looks great, intuitive to use.
- I love the full screen mode of many apps and not seeing a menu in the top left corner, and switching between various full screen apps / desktops with CTRL-directional arrow is very cool. Browser, Mail, Calendar, and regular windowed desktop is what I'm using right now. Very nice also that I could easily drop a 'top sites' button in the corner of that full sized browser.
- 23 Euros!

Missed opportunities:
- I'd rather have the launch pad as my primary desktop. Get rid of the dock. In fact, I would prefer to have just that, and then with the option to have some kind of notification bar show me input from stuff like chat or twitter stuff that stays while I swipe out full screen apps.
- fonts are still not Windows quality
- full screen App Store?

Can't be helped much:
- my Mac Mini is a tad sluggish at times
 
I also bought and installed it on my Mac mini.

My first impressions are similar:

- I like the launchpad. A "start menu" is long overdue for MacOS X, and this is better than the start menu in Windows 7. Back in Snow Leopard I actually put my application folder on the dock (the lower right area) as a poor man's start menu.

- The fullscreen mode takes some time to get used to, but since I have a small monitor for my Mac mini (only 17") it's very useful.

- My mid-2009 Mac mini is showing its age, too. Some animation and fade in/fade out effects are not smooth.

- If you are using Xcode, note that old Xcode can't run on Lion, and you need an update. Fortunately, Xcode 4.1 is now available on Mac App Store for free. However, it's another huge download and the installer is not exactly bug free. It complains that iTunes needs to be closed, but after closing iTunes it still refused to continue. I have to kill a hidden "iTunes helper" process to make it go further. Another problem is on my first installation attempt it crashed. I have to install it a second time to make it work.
 
I also bought and installed it on my Mac mini.

My first impressions are similar:

- I like the launchpad. A "start menu" is long overdue for MacOS X, and this is better than the start menu in Windows 7. Back in Snow Leopard I actually put my application folder on the dock (the lower right area) as a poor man's start menu.

I did the exact same thing :) Same with my Documents folder, and my downloads folder.

Now I've cleaned up the dock, put it back at the bottom and made it auto-hide. I already used hot corners, and now I put the launch pad in the top left corner for easy selecting applications, and mission control in the bottom right corner for easy switching to open workspaces. This is starting to be really nice. I can always keep my email, browser and calendar full screen panels open and when you shut down the computer they also go into a sleep mode so you get them back the way you left them.

- The fullscreen mode takes some time to get used to, but since I have a small monitor for my Mac mini (only 17") it's very useful.

The hot corners setup I chose above really helps there!

- My mid-2009 Mac mini is showing its age, too. Some animation and fade in/fade out effects are not smooth.

Sounds like these two macs are brothers. :)

- If you are using Xcode, note that old Xcode can't run on Lion, and you need an update. Fortunately, Xcode 4.1 is now available on Mac App Store for free. However, it's another huge download and the installer is not exactly bug free. It complains that iTunes needs to be closed, but after closing iTunes it still refused to continue. I have to kill a hidden "iTunes helper" process to make it go further. Another problem is on my first installation attempt it crashed. I have to install it a second time to make it work.

Thanks for the tip, I'll go and attempt to install that now.

EDIT: Yep had to do the same thing, kill the iTnues Helper process. I guess this is Apple's Shibboleth to weed out people not smart enough to be developers. ;)
 
I did the exact same thing :) Same with my Documents folder, and my downloads folder.

I'm confused, I just set up my mom's mid 2010 macbook air (Snow Leopard) for her, and those 3 folders were in the dock (lower right area) by default. They even made a big deal of it, with a little pdf in each folder explaining what it was and an "open in finder" shortcut. I think Apple might be spying on you guys.
 
I'm confused, I just set up my mom's mid 2010 macbook air (Snow Leopard) for her, and those 3 folders were in the dock (lower right area) by default. They even made a big deal of it, with a little pdf in each folder explaining what it was and an "open in finder" shortcut. I think Apple might be spying on you guys.

Yeah, they actually do study user behavior so who knows. :) I got my Mac Mini in first half 2009 if I remember correctly, not sure.

I first thought the Dashboard was useless by the way, but now I'm finding it's a nice addition. You can really easily grab bits of a web page to show there, which works very nicely. The only incongruous bit now seems the Desktop itself, which feels very out of date. :D

I also really love the App Store integration now. It was there already on Snow Leopard, but it really needs the launchpad to go along with it.
 
Any chance they removed the constant nagging about not "properly ejecting" friggin' hotpluggable USB drives? Every god damn TIME! It's getting really bothersome, especially since I keep a drive attached to my full-size keyboard and of course, since it's a laptop I regularly unplug the keyboard when I need to take the computer with me...

There's no reason for the OS to whine about this anyway, it shouldn't have write caching enabled for a removable drive in the first place, and since it would know if it was writing anything to the drive when it was removed there's no need to nag me constantly about it just for treating a hot-pluggable unit for what it is.

The nag-factor is (unfortunately) at least 300x worse on macos than windows, you try to restart the system, up pops a window asking if that's what you really wanted. And there's no little checkbox to just click that says "fuck off, stop bothering me about this". Same with shutdown. And when you click yes to that darned thing, up pops another nagbox from skype, warning me that if I exit the program I won't be able to receive any phone calls or IMs or video conferences... No shit, sherlock. And no way to turn off that crap either, I had to stop using skype on the mac because if I didn't answer yes to the damn window that pops up it aborts my system shutdown. (!!!) Whatta fuck?

At least in windows, if a program is obstinate during an initiated restart/shutdown it will be force-closed automatically, but no such luck here. "No" is even the default option in the skype window, so just a simple keypress on enter on the keyboard won't let me proceed quickly and easily... *sigh*
 
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There's no reason for the OS to whine about this anyway, it shouldn't have write caching enabled for a removable drive in the first place, and since it would know if it was writing anything to the drive when it was removed there's no need to nag me constantly about it just for treating a hot-pluggable unit for what it is.

Of course there is. If there's no warning at all, there will be some people who remove a USB drive when the OS is writing, and it'd be too late to display any warning (as data is already lost). Of course, some may argue that it's sufficient to display such warning the first time only, but that'd be assuming that you are the only person using that computer.

To me there is a very simple solution: simply click the "eject" button next to the USB drive in a Finder's window. It's much easier to do this than under Windows.

The nag-factor is (unfortunately) at least 300x worse on macos than windows, you try to restart the system, up pops a window asking if that's what you really wanted. And there's no little checkbox to just click that says "fuck off, stop bothering me about this". Same with shutdown. And when you click yes to that darned thing, up pops another nagbox from skype, warning me that if I exit the program I won't be able to receive any phone calls or IMs or video conferences... No shit, sherlock. And no way to turn off that crap either, I had to stop using skype on the mac because if I didn't answer yes to the damn window that pops up it aborts my system shutdown. (!!!) Whatta fuck?

Actually I like the confirmation. On Windows 7, the "shutdown" button is very close to the extended functions button (for log out, suspend, switch user, restart, etc.) and sometimes I click the shutdown button accidentally, and it just shutdowns the computer, and that's annoying.

Also, Lion tries to fix the shutdown/restart problem. The target is to make shutdown/restart only a brief interruption to your workflow. Of course, this will require application support, but in theory if all application support this function then no application will need to block a shutdown/restart and all running applications should automatically relaunch (and resume to their pre-shutdown states) after the system is restarted.
 
If there's no warning at all, there will be some people who remove a USB drive when the OS is writing, and it'd be too late to display any warning
And the warning fixes this how, exactly? By teaching people not to do that after they've already done it? :LOL: No, this is silly and pointless.

(as data is already lost).
It's not lost, it's still in the computer. Just have the OS put up a window IF it's actually writing anything, asking you to put the thing back in so it can finish writing. That's all. Nagging me a hundred times about doing something that was completely harmless (unplugging when it wasn't writing) won't do any damn good whatsoever.

To me there is a very simple solution: simply click the "eject" button next to the USB drive in a Finder's window. It's much easier to do this than under Windows.
That's not a solution... That's a workaround. :p

On Windows 7, the "shutdown" button is very close to the extended functions button
Yeah, that's a bit crap UI design there, especially since the combobox arrow button to expand the menu is rather small and easy to miss, and sits squished right up to the shutdown button itself. Then again, MS did a number on the UI for IE9 also, ugh...

I preferred previous windowses when there were discrete buttons with colored icons, that was much more ergonomic. Anyhow, I've only ever misclicked like 1 or maybe 2 times total, it's no biggie compared to being nagged Every Time...

The target is to make shutdown/restart only a brief interruption to your workflow.
Yeah I read about this, the previews didn't mention it would need app support, but I guess that's logical even though emulators for example have supported resume state for ages. Perhaps it's a matter of practicalities, if a bunch of big programs were to have their entire memory contents dumped straight to disk it could potentially take a minute or more to affect a restart...

I'm also a little curious about media wear for SSDs. Like, how much stuff exactly is getting written each restart, and so on.

Hopefully no OS function will save down corrupted restoration data to disk and dynamically restore back to a glitchy state which you orignially restarted to get out of in the first place! ;)
 
And the warning fixes this how, exactly? By teaching people not to do that after they've already done it? :LOL: No, this is silly and pointless.

Skype didn't do this warning for me on 10.6, and not now on 10.7 either. Are you sure this isn't configurable?

It's not lost, it's still in the computer. Just have the OS put up a window IF it's actually writing anything, asking you to put the thing back in so it can finish writing. That's all. Nagging me a hundred times about doing something that was completely harmless (unplugging when it wasn't writing) won't do any damn good whatsoever.

Still easy to forget. Whenever I work with a USB device that I write data to, I use the clean way and stop the USB device. I've been burnt too many times. In that aspect, the eject button is more convenient. On the other hand many times I only read from USB, and then I don't want to get a warning.

Yeah, that's a bit crap UI design there, especially since the combobox arrow button to expand the menu is rather small and easy to miss, and sits squished right up to the shutdown button itself. Then again, MS did a number on the UI for IE9 also, ugh...

Fortunately in the shutting down processes window you can press cancel.

Yeah I read about this, the previews didn't mention it would need app support, but I guess that's logical even though emulators for example have supported resume state for ages. Perhaps it's a matter of practicalities, if a bunch of big programs were to have their entire memory contents dumped straight to disk it could potentially take a minute or more to affect a restart...

It works quite nicely for the apps that support it.

Hopefully no OS function will save down corrupted restoration data to disk and dynamically restore back to a glitchy state which you orignially restarted to get out of in the first place! ;)

Hope is a good thing. :D

Right now, I'm trying to do some stuff with XCode 4, but it still seems very buggy. I"ve had lots of crashes at any rate. Also I'm trying to learn to work with the integrated UI builder which is a great improvement, but I'm having a pretty hard time getting used to it. Objective C itself doesn't help either, it's just too different from what I'm used to. I know I'm a newbie to programming on the Mac, but I still wish it were a little easier.
 
And the warning fixes this how, exactly? By teaching people not to do that after they've already done it? :LOL: No, this is silly and pointless.

No, my point is, if you only tell people that it's not good to remove without ejecting when it's writing something, it's pointless. So it'd be better to tell people when they are doing things wrong but not causing problems (yet).

Of course, it's better if the OS "remembers" that there were no data written to the USB drive so it doesn't issue warning in a read-only case (and the warning should read like "if you copy or write data into your USB drive, eject before remove it").

It's not lost, it's still in the computer. Just have the OS put up a window IF it's actually writing anything, asking you to put the thing back in so it can finish writing. That's all. Nagging me a hundred times about doing something that was completely harmless (unplugging when it wasn't writing) won't do any damn good whatsoever.

That'd require the OS to cache all data it's currently writing, and that's not necessarily possible in all cases nor is it efficient. Not all writing operation is a copy operation. The application currently writing data into the USB drive could be generating the data on the fly and it's possible that it can't reproduce the data.

Yeah I read about this, the previews didn't mention it would need app support, but I guess that's logical even though emulators for example have supported resume state for ages. Perhaps it's a matter of practicalities, if a bunch of big programs were to have their entire memory contents dumped straight to disk it could potentially take a minute or more to affect a restart...

I'm also a little curious about media wear for SSDs. Like, how much stuff exactly is getting written each restart, and so on.

Hopefully no OS function will save down corrupted restoration data to disk and dynamically restore back to a glitchy state which you orignially restarted to get out of in the first place! ;)

Well, that'd be hibernation instead of a real shutdown then :)
The point of Lion's new function is to let application decide which data to store instead of mindlessly writing all working memory into the disk. That's why it requires application support. Also this avoid the possible problem of applications stuck in a corrupted state. (Although if the application support this by some stupid ways, it's still possible to be stuck)
 
Wow, soo much Lion talk in this thread... (not really).

Regardless of those with USB eject and shut down "problems" (I'm surprised anyone does this anymore) I think Lion is a really solid piece of software and I am especially pleased by the new APIs.

Disregarding the "dumbed" down interfaces, like LaunchPad, you can easily see the foundation for greatness.

Although Option+Space brings up Spotlight for me and basically functions as my application / document etc. launcher. Much faster. It's all down to workflow I suppose.

Auto Save and Versioning are just awesome when applications get proper support for it.

FileVault 2 is a great feature with very little overhead. Especially nice for those using notebooks.

If you have no idea what was new (simply because you are a newcomer to the platform or didn't know before) you should consider reading Ars Technica's OS X 10.7 Lion review by John Siracusa.
 
To me there is a very simple solution: simply click the "eject" button next to the USB drive in a Finder's window. It's much easier to do this than under Windows.

Not sure what windows version you're referring to but it's pretty easy and more logical in W7 now. Previous versions you had to bring up a list of USB devices from the "safely remove" icon, then it showed a list of devices, usually 3 belonging to one USB drive, that a consumer would have no idea what they're looking at, then select one and stop it. Ridiculous setup.

Now you just right-click the remove icon and select the device you want to remove, a single device named appropriately from the ID given by the device. I actually use this function now in windows whereas before I just ripped out the damn thing from the PC.
 
Now you just right-click the remove icon and select the device you want to remove, a single device named appropriately from the ID given by the device. I actually use this function now in windows whereas before I just ripped out the damn thing from the PC.

Well, there is a single problem with Windows 7's both approach: ejecting a removable media is a common operation and it should be in a readily accessible place. But under Windows 7 you have to either click at the task bar icon list to bring up all task bar icons (for some system there are tens of them), find the icon representing "device list" and click on it to select the media you want to remove; or bring up an explorer window, look at the left side panel to see the removable drives list (which is fine until this moment), right click on it to bring up a massive menu which happens to contain an "eject" entry.

Now compare this to MacOS X, where from the start you have a list of removable drives (which are nicely separated from normal non-removable drives), all have their own eject button right next to it.

Therefore, I can understand why some people don't want to manually eject an USB drive every time under Windows, because it's not a straight forward operation (although as you said Window 7 greatly improved on this compared to previous version). However, under MacOS X it's just much easier so there shouldn't be a problem to manually eject an USB drive every time.
 
I saw the following on wiki for OS X Lion

System requirements :
Mac OS X 10.6.6 or later (Mac OS X 10.6.8 is recommended)

so they are charging you for a patch ?
 
Skype didn't do this warning for me on 10.6, and not now on 10.7 either. Are you sure this isn't configurable?
I've looked and looked and not found such a setting. Although your post gives me hope, I'll go look again. :)

Fortunately in the shutting down processes window you can press cancel.
If you got a fast SSD, the window of opportunity you have to cancel before windows has force-quit all your open programs and proceeded to the blue shutdown screen is often so small you simply don't have the time to react to what's happening, position the mouse button over said button, and click on it...

Wow, soo much Lion talk in this thread... (not really).
Sorry. :oops:

FileVault 2 is a great feature with very little overhead. Especially nice for those using notebooks.
This is the disk encryption stuff, yes? I'll ask you since you seem to know stuff... :) Is it known if Apple is using the new sandy bridge CPU instructions for encryption? Apparantly these instructions can make a huge difference in performance. Apple's a bit crap it seems in incorporating software support for the hardware features it puts into their products, like spotty quickpath transcoding support, and no hybrid SSD/HDD support in the iMacs, even though hardware supporting it is integrated into the chipset...

They could work harder at this methinks, especially since all Macs are closed systems that can't be upgraded. It makes their job easier, in not having to support millions of hardware setups like windows must do, and it improves customer value for money, making their stuff more attractive. :)
 
This is the disk encryption stuff, yes? I'll ask you since you seem to know stuff... :) Is it known if Apple is using the new sandy bridge CPU instructions for encryption? Apparantly these instructions can make a huge difference in performance. Apple's a bit crap it seems in incorporating software support for the hardware features it puts into their products, like spotty quickpath transcoding support, and no hybrid SSD/HDD support in the iMacs, even though hardware supporting it is integrated into the chipset...

They could work harder at this methinks, especially since all Macs are closed systems that can't be upgraded. It makes their job easier, in not having to support millions of hardware setups like windows must do, and it improves customer value for money, making their stuff more attractive. :)

According to Ars Technica's review, FileVault 2 uses AES-NI.

Intel's Quick Sync encoder is better than GPU based encoders, but it's still not up to software encoders' quality standard (at least the best software encoders, Apple's Quicktime H.264 encoder is not famous for its encoding quality...)

I'd really like to see SSD cache function enabled in the new Mac mini. Big SSD are still very expensive and SSD cache could be helpful with Mac mini's slow 2.5" HDD. However, since Intel's SSD cache technology is supported on Z68 only, and I'm not sure what chipset the new Mac mini actually use, so I don't have high hope on this. On the other hand, Apple should be able to implement their own SSD cache (like Microsoft's Ready Boost).
 
According to Ars Technica's review, FileVault 2 uses AES-NI.
That's great to hear. I may enable this then for my macbook. I don't need any additional passwords other than my login? I've never faffed with disk encryption before so I don't know how it works. :p

Intel's Quick Sync encoder is better than GPU based encoders, but it's still not up to software encoders' quality standard
Yes I'm sure you're right, but it's mainly intended for realtime video isn't it? So it doesn't matter if the quality is a little spotty at times, because CMOS-based USB web cameras and such aren't terribly gret either most of the time. :)

However, since Intel's SSD cache technology is supported on Z68 only, and I'm not sure what chipset the new Mac mini actually use, so I don't have high hope on this.
The iMacs use the Z68, and at least the 27" model can fit both a 3.5" and a 2.5" drive at the same time. Not sure about the smaller iMac though, but I believe there's room in that one as well (apparantly they stuff the 2.5" drive beneath the optical drive).

Mac Minis can fit two drives now as well - in theory, as Apple in their infinite wisdom may not ship a dual-drive mounting bracket in all Minis - so it would be a very useful feature to have, as you say.

I'd be satisfied with just a decently large SSD in my macbook as long as I get Trim support. I heard via the internet grapevine that Lion was supposed to support Trim universally, and not just on their own Apple-branded (crappy, 3gbit/s Toshiba) drives. Never seen any definitive information on that though. A sandforce 2 6gbit/s drive would be pretty sweet. Dare I hope of 5 second boot times? :p
 
Weirdness:

After installing (won't say "upgrading", because frankly I don't really notice any improvements) lion, the updating of the dock icons when mousing over them is a lot jerkier. With snow kitty, it was totally smooth - mostly. Now it's choppy and looks bad.

Also, when putting the computer to sleep it wakes right back up again after about 5 seconds or so. So every time I want to sleep it I have to do it twice, and it's really annoying.

Anyone noticed anything similar?
 
I saw the following on wiki for OS X Lion

System requirements :
Mac OS X 10.6.6 or later (Mac OS X 10.6.8 is recommended)

so they are charging you for a patch ?

These are the requirements for installing 10.7. You are recommended to be on X 10.6.8 before you upgrade to 10.7.

10.6.8 to 10.7 may not look like much, but it's a bigger upgrade than from Vista to Windows 7, certainly in terms of what you notice as an end user. I like it a lot.

And that's coming from someone who has been skeptical about Apple and still hesitates about the value for money proposition. Because no matter how nice the Mini is with Lion, it doesn't really make up for Windows 7 running on vastly superior hardware for the same price, not yet anyway.

@Grall: definitely the OS is a little laggier at times. The dynamic loading and suspending of apps as well as using more memory for virtual desktops and such unquestionably comes at a cost. I do expect that to smooth out a fair bit over time though - this is the very first public release after all. But I've had no issues with sleep - my Mini goes to sleep as usual.
 
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