OSX Lion review

[ninja9578]

So I got Lion today, it installed in about 20 minutes, all from the App store, very nice. I've seen a few bugs, but all are visual, no functional bugs yet. Looks and feels very much like iOS, but with all the OSX features too. I'll go through the new features that I like the best. Launchpad Launchpad is a fast way to launch apps without going through Finder. It looks and feels just like an iPad, swipe between pages, there are even group. I can fly around my computer with this feature. Mission Control It's a hybrid of expose, dashboard, and spaces. It shows you everything running on your computer, and organizes everything nicely. Versions This is awesome. It's like Time machine, except automatic. It creates back versions of everything that you do. Sort of like svn, or mercurial, but automatic and behind the scenes. Lets you revert changes, and can even copy and paste things between versions. It integrates with another new feature, autosave. You don't have to save anything in Lion, but you still have the option to. It's also pretty trippy, the stars float towards you. Fullscreen app Most Apple software has fullscreen modes now. They aren't just bigger versions of the regular window, they rearrange things to optimize workflow. Going into fullscreen mode opens a new space. You can swipe between spaces with one gesture, so it's really efficient. It not only makes it really easy to see everything, but also frees up screen space in the main space. You can have multiple apps in fullscreen at once, and go back to any other app without ever leaving fullscreen mode. I will use this feature probably more than any other. Safari The new Safari is insane. It's fast as hell, I've never seen anything like the new Safari. When you navigate to a page, it seems to pull most of it from the cache, and immediately display it, then redraw only the parts of it that have changed. Earlier Safaris, Chrome, Firefox all go white while loading a page until it's nearly ready. I've read they completely reworked their caching system. Rendering is also now much more hardware accelerated, especially HTML5 pages. Sourceforge is really fast. Safari also has a sweet new way to browse history. You swipe to one side, and it goes back, swipe the other way and it goes forward. Again, doing the diff and only updating parts, so everything is really reactive. I can post in one thread, then swipe to one side and be back to the DV index as if I never left it. You can also push it over a little just to preview the history. They took Google's lead, and sandboxed each tab too. Nice. No Scrollbars The scrolling took a while to get used to, but not long, already used to it. There are no longer scrollbars, and the scrolling is backwards. Scrolling up now moves the page up, instead of the scrollbar, like iOS. You can change it to use the old style. iOS-like scrollbars appear when you scroll, so you can easily go through huge documents without having to swipe forever. Autocorrect When you spell something wrong, an iOS like suggestion comes up, and it will take the first one automatically if your preferences are set up to do so. I shut it off, it doesn't make much sense on a physical keyboard. Quicktime Quicktime got a lot more advance and added one feature that I've been dying for that is not available on any platform: Screen recording. There is a lot of sharing features too, like one click to Youtube of Facebook. There is video and audio recording built in, it's really slick. There are a few other features that I haven't used yet, like FaceTime, Resume, and Airdrop. I'd give it a 9/10. Much more refined UI than any of the Linux distros (and damn stable UNIX backend too,) and years (decades) ahead of anything from Microsoft or Oracle. Microsoft has fallen so far behind, Apple doesn't even seem to consider them competition anymore. The next decade will be Apple vs Google. Both are innovation giants with boatloads of money, so the evolution of technologies I think will actually accelerate.

[tommo]

Awesome, I was wondering if it'd be worth it since I just got Snow Leopard last year in November. Seems like it might be.... Although my iMac is mid-2008, so maybe it wouldn't work that well? Not sure though. Quicktime always had screen recording though. (well, maybe not always, but since I've had a Mac anyway.) Just no sound. Does it have that now too? Like record through mic for tutorials etc? Oh and also can you use magic mouse for all those swiping things etc? Don't like trackpads.

[ninja9578]

I would assume so.