Mac OS/X Lion (Out Now)

[Grall]

Why is Lion such a fucking hog on RAM? Seriously, I have 4GB in my machine, and with almost nothing running nearly 3 gigs are eaten up. Tried playing some Left 4 Dead, took ages for the level to load due to all the hard drive swapping.

Safari's a particularly gluttonous bitch on memory, with 2 empty tabs and a page from Ars Technica it wanted over a quarter gigabyte. WHAT THE HELL! That's ridiculous.

 

[Pressure]

Why is Lion such a fucking hog on RAM? Seriously, I have 4GB in my machine, and with almost nothing running nearly 3 gigs are eaten up. Tried playing some Left 4 Dead, took ages for the level to load due to all the hard drive swapping.

Safari's a particularly gluttonous bitch on memory, with 2 empty tabs and a page from Ars Technica it wanted over a quarter gigabyte. WHAT THE HELL! That's ridiculous.

Can you take a picture of Activity Monitor running showing the real memory usage? You are probably seeing the sandboxed Safari Web content using a lot of memory.

You can take a picture of the window by holding down Shift + Command + 4 and then clicking space.

 

[Grall]

Lion's disconnected me from my wifi network two times now after coming out of sleep. The icon still looks the same as when connected, but anything trying to reach the router (including time machine automatic backups) will fail.

I've seen others post about this on Mac forums, so I'm hoping there'll be a bug fix for this in a maintenance release. It's not a big issue really, but it's a few unnecessary mouse clicks to re-connect to the wifi network again...

Anyone else seeing this?

Oh, and what's up with the spell chequer sometimes auto-correcting typos and sometimes not, and instead just leaving them the way they are with a dotted red line underneath them? I've been looking for some kind of pattern and there just doesn't seem to be one.

 

[Richard]

Lion's disconnected me from my wifi network two times now after coming out of sleep. The icon still looks the same as when connected, but anything trying to reach the router (including time machine automatic backups) will fail.

I've seen others post about this on Mac forums, so I'm hoping there'll be a bug fix for this in a maintenance release. It's not a big issue really, but it's a few unnecessary mouse clicks to re-connect to the wifi network again...

Now imagine you're playing Diablo 3 when that happens.

A friend of mine upgraded his MBP 2010 to Lion and he says the fonts on the menu are too "bold" he says. I haven't had a chance to look at it myself but I think Lion had some font changes. Anyone notice that?

 

[Grall]

Now imagine you're playing Diablo 3 when that happens.

OMG ROFL!

he says the fonts on the menu are too "bold" he says.

Can't really say I've noticed that one. Maybe it depends a bit on the DPI/rez of your display? I'm on an ancient terrible 19" 1280*1024 DVI monitor right now until I'm able to upgrade and I think fonts look....pretty much the same on the whole. Then again I haven't used a Mac for very long, so maybe I'm missing some subtleties.

 

[SedentaryJourney]

Actually, the sluggish nature of OSX's window manager was well-known and VERY widely criticized at the time. Ars did whole articles about it, and they're amongst the biggest Apple fans around for example.

I fail to see how transparent window borders in of themselves would be so awfully terrible as you imply - sounds more like you think they must be terrible because Macos doesn't have them, IE fanboy reasoning.

10.2 Jaguar introduced Quartz Extreme and had transparent window borders. Apple removed them in 10.3 probably for aesthetic reasons since Jaguar was able to composite in excess of 25 transparencies without issue. Also transparency remained for windows and the dock.

Sometimes Apple just removes things for the sake of minimalism. When Aqua was first demoed Steve Jobs showed minimized videos running in the dock but this was later removed in Leopard. Now people complain that OS X doesn't have live video previews like the Windows 7 taskbar. Cutting down on visual clutter seems to be the trend at Apple, until they do something horrendous like the new iCal leather theme.

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.

Wouldn't using launch pad as your primary desktop and then switching between full screen apps imply killing off the desktop metaphor altogether? This is Mac OS, drag and drop between windows isn't just a vestige of some forgotten past, it's what makes the interface great.

BTW invoking expose and using the dock to switch between apps still works great in Lion. I use it more than Mission Control.

- fonts are still not Windows quality

I always figured it was the other way around.

 

[pcchen]

Apple has released a "Lion Recovery Disk Assistant" tool allowing users to create a bootable USB drive for recovery.

 

[Davros]

a video review
http://videosift.com/video/Nerdrage-Mac-OS-X-Lion-rant

whats with the inverted scrolling

 

[Grall]

You can turn off the wonky "natural" (as Apple coined it) inverted scrolling in the control panel thingy (that isn't called the control panel, I forget the real name.)

It was driving me nucking futs initially, but it's not a big deal. Just click a widget and it's back the way it's always been. Now if someone can tell me why my Mac keeps waking up out of sleep I'd be real happy...

What I probably like most in Lion is I can now shut my macbook without it going to sleep if there's an external screen connected, but it's a bit silly you can crash the Mac by opening it up, powering it up and then closing it again before the login prompt appears. End result is a grey screen and a non-responsive system.

Oh, and the fullscreen mode is pretty rad too (although the Commodore Amiga's windowing manager (Intuition) had that basic functionality back in 1985 though... )

 

[Arwin]

I have been using the lion for quite some time now and though it is good to always be up to date, I would have loved to stay with the snow leopard longer than the lion. Apart from the addition of more gestures, the launchpad and mission control, there is not much to offer for casual users. I understand that they really intended this for developers so there is really not much to ponder on.

What about full-screen apps, state saves, etc.? I use that all the time. I now find it almost anachronistic to be in the old 'desktop' pane.

 

[Grall]

Fullscreen mode is great for small screens. I'm still waiting for the Thunderbolt Display, and its 27"/2600 rez probably makes fullscreen rather overkill.

Don't really care for state saves. If I restart my computer, it's 9/10 because I want to get RID of all the stuff that's running, not have all that stuff quietly re-load as I login without telling me...

 

[Mize]

anyone running Lion on a MBP/2.6GHz C2D (2009 vintage) with 8GB RAM? Just wondering how much slower it is compared with Snow Leopard as I'm debating the upgrade...

The wife got a new MBA, 11" with Lion and it's quite fast owing to the SSD...

 

[Mize]

a video review
http://videosift.com/video/Nerdrage-Mac-OS-X-Lion-rant

whats with the inverted scrolling

Makes it more tablet-like, particularly with apple's mouse (which I refuse to refer to by its absurdly stupid name).

 

[Arwin]

Also you can change the direction in settings. I use a bamboo with touch and then this makes a lot of sense.

 

[shiznit]

Once I "fixed" mouse acceleration, the new scrolling actually grew on me. Just remember you are moving the page not the camera.

 

[Grall]

Apple just updated the EFI on my Macbook with a new version, and now I get an icon for the guest user on the filevault password screen whenever I boot up the machine. How can I disable this? I don't want any guest accounts showing up and forcing extra clicks for no reason...

Thanks a lot for any help.

 

[Mize]

No clue, but have you tried disabling the guest account?

 

[Grall]

Yes, but I don't know how to do that.

I visited the Users and Groups System Prefs applet, but found no real way to do away with the guest account entirely, or at least not without disabling file sharing too. Or maybe I can still fileshare via LAN even with the guest user disabled?

To be more precise, the "Allow guests to log in" checkbox is currently unchecked, "Parental Controls" is unchecked, and "Allow guests to connect" is checked. Even though the first checkbox is unchecked, I still get the guest account on the filevault EFI password screen...

Thanks for your help though.

 

[Mize]

You can allow guest SMB sharing without enabling the Guest account.
For SMB/LAN sharing "guest" just means no username or password. For the "Guest" account this allows a temporary home folder to be created for people who login to the console without a user account.

So...I would think you could disable the user "Guest Account" and then just enable "everyone" to connect to your shared directories.

I'm not running Lion (yet) but my wife is. On Snow Leopard you go to system prefs->accounts then unlock it and disable Guest Account

 

[zed]

A couple of easy questions

1. How can I scroll a browser window like this -> Press middle mouse button in (cursor changes), move mouse up/down to scroll. I use this all the time in windows/linux. But can I do this in mac with chrome?

2. any apps to improve the mouses handling

3. Im gonna download Xcode 1.7GB now does this need to be downloaded in one go (Its gonna take hours) or can I download part and then later on it will resume downloading when Im next online

4. How can I widen the narrow scrollbars on the windows side

cheers zed