I found nearly all Lion's UI changes annoying, and instantly looked for ways to revert them after installing. It made me worried that Apple is getting Redmond Disease. Windows used to have a nice unified UI -- learn once, use anywhere -- before "creative" monstrosities like the new Office UI.
I don't know man. You sound like you just don't like new stuff.
That said, I am not very excited about many pieces of the Lion UI either. Inertial scrolling is amazingly useful, though. Also, I quite like the 'Ribbon' in Office. Much better discoverability than all those hundreds of menus beforehand.
I can't speak for the parent, but personally, I just don't like awful new stuff. My iMac has a 27" display and a fairly expensive set of peripherals. It's not an iPad. In their efforts to make it into one, they broke nearly everything they touched. Scrolling that can't be set up the way I want it (without third party utilities), scroll bars that hide useful information in order to save 0.04% of screen real estate, full screen windows that are almost always massive overkill, but can't really be ignored because to implement them they had to break useful functionality in Spaces. The list goes on, well, not quite forever, but the list of stupid ideas in Lion is to a first approximation, the same as the list of ideas in Lion.
The single greatest improvement I've seen in the time I've had my iMac was when the hard drive died and it came back with Snow Leopard without me having to spend the time to downgrade it myself.
See, I don't really agree with that. Yes, fullscreen is worse than useless on more than one monitors. But you don't have to use it. Fullscreening an app on a big monitor was never very useful in the first place.
But as I said, inertial scrolling is great. Spaces are great. The gestures to navigate spaces are great.
All that Versions and Autosave stuff is atrocious. But I rarely stumble into it since I mostly use Emacs.
I really like the non-existent scrollbars. I don't miss having those ugly grab-bars on every window one bit.
All things told, I'd rather have Lion than Snow Leopard, but really only by a small margin.
Except that the useless button replaced one that I actually used before. Especially Finder windows are a pain to get to 'normal mode'.
> I really like the non-existent scrollbars.
The problem is that they only work when the content is obviously clipped, which is easier to ensure on the iPhone.
I had two instances where the content seemed to perfectly fit its box (Xcode4 & Recovery Partition). Took me a while to find out that there's more.
I appreciate what Lion aims for, but I could rant about its usability for hours. Almost all my bugs are duplicates, and they are all still open even after 10.7.3. :(
I'd bet a million dollars Apple's gonna fix the full screen "bugs" in a future release. They probably just haven't figured a good way (and API) for that...
If inertial scrolling were actually implemented everywhere, I might be alright with it. Instead, it exists for the normal case of scrolling content, but when you go to use spaces you hit right and the content goes left. The same thing happens when you scroll to the side to go back/forward, though this is only true if you conceptually represent your current web page as the rightmost of a sequence.
I have liked that Spaces is no longer incredibly broken, but it's a bit annoying that I can't have any configuration other than a really long line full of virtual desktops.
The "make it like iOS" thing scared the hell out of me. Desktops and laptops are not the same type of device as iOS devices. Attempts to unify them will result in ugliness and functional regression.
The problem with scrolling in Lion is not so much that it's "new stuff" but rather that it breaks a convention that people (even Apple users) have been used to for decades. All of a sudden, by moving your pointer down, you scroll up. It is freaking annoying.
I don't know, I don't like most of the changes in Lion. They look like a really bad "first step" towards something that isn't there yet. Like removing your car's wheels just because you imagine that at some point people will want flying cars that work on antigravity. And then you get the inconsistent bits like making the window buttons smaller. Just... crap.
> it breaks a convention that people (even Apple users)
> have been used to for decades
And it took me about 40 minutes to adjust. I just told myself "you are moving content within a window, not window around the content, just like you do on iPhone" and thing everything clicked into places.
I'll make the seemingly-obvious argument that is made every time this issue comes up in Internet forums: "natural" scrolling is fine for a single user of a single computer, but if you use multiple computers -- particularly multiple OSes -- "natural" scrolling is anything but natural.
Further, it may be easy to adapt to for one person on one system, but what is the net benefit? It seems to me the sole benefit for "natural" scrolling (and most other Lion changes) is seen primarily in unifying the UI for users who own a Mac and one or more iOS devices. Otherwise, it's yet one more change forcing users to adapt. And yet, the new scrolling method is the default. Was the old way really hindering anyone?
If we kept on doing things by tradition though, we'd be stuck with some of the base assumptions of the first computers. Breaking changes are absolutely necessary for many kinds of changes, especially one like scrolling direction where there are only two mutually-exclusive options.
They don't always lead to improvement, but they are a requirement a large amount of the time. Why the nostalgia for what you've used for 'decades'?
All this talk of suddenly the scrolling going in a different direction reminds me of playing Halo in middle school. Everyone knew who played "inverted" to avoid picking up their controller.
I agree with you though, I bought a refurbished Macbook Pro for school this summer and I was so happy to learn refurbished machines still shipped with Snow Leopard.
The scrolling direction change was one of the few changes in Lion's UI that I actually liked; it took me an hour or two to get used to it, but I'd gotten scrolling directions confused between iPad and iPhone and the Mac before that -- especially when the iPad was propped up and facing me, like a monitor.
Agreed. I think the worst offense in my book is reopening all of my previous apps when I restart. Not only do most programs still not support it (so they don't reopen my documents etc and just sit there) often the whole point of restarting was to get myself to a nice fresh slate. With "sleep on lid close" and other such things I never actually power my computer down these days.
No, the worst is each application remembering your open windows. Particularly Preview.
Let's say you view a sensitive image in Preview, then use Cmd+Q to quit. A week later you open a new image, directly from the Finder, to show a work colleague, and it opens in Preview.
First Preview loads up the previous sensitive image (restoring the state of Preview), and afterwards your work image. Work colleauge sees sensitive image. Embarrassment all around! (Well, actually just lots of laughs, but it could have been!)
Moral of the story: always use Cmd+W to close all documents individually in Preview, and only afterwards Cmd+Q.
Bigger moral: Apple really messed this one up. Opening applications via documents in the Finder shouldn't restore previous application states, because the whole point is that you're starting with a new, specific document.
Happened to me too, I had a party invitation open in a work environment because Pages was the first app that bit me. Rotating through five NDA'd projects, I'm happy that it was as harmless as that.
Another privacy trap is how Lion's Dock menus show recent files. Given a setup where a Mac is connected to a projector (presentation, video night), this makes it fatally dangerous to quit applications. You easily end up broadcasting Secret-Client-Sales-Pitch.ppt or sensitive video filenames. Also annoying when sharing computers, where before I used to trust my friends not to dig into Recent Files menus (not something you'd do by accident).
Two of my personal anecdotes:
Winamp cleverly remembers its last playlist. I once wanted to use a close relative's open Windows laptop to play a clearly visible music file at a family gathering. I accidentally presented his most recently watched 'rather sensitive video' to everyone.
Another time, I downloaded a sex ed quiz from the App Store's Top 50. It claimed a very low rate of infection from an HIV positive mom to her baby. For the benefit of science, we verified that fact using Google. Imagine the thoughts of a CouchSurfer when she saw the "recent" search query weeks later, borrowing my iPad to look up train schedules. Glad she asked me about it.
These are all things that should not even go wrong once, so "getting used to it" does not help.
Doesn't really solve the issue but you can globally disable per-application restore in Preferences and you can use Cmd-Opt-Q to make apps forget currently open windows instead of manually closing documents.
Funny, the whole point of restarting for me is either "my battery ran out and I need to boot up again after plugging in" or "I had to install software updates", and it's a total pain in the ass to lose all my tabs and stuff when that happens.
If I just wanted to close all my open applications, I would just close all my open applications.
I disagree: Having to switch to Windows from time to time (insufficient power to run Visual Studio virtualized), I love it that I can reboot into the same state I was before. Most of my applications save their view state anyway, so coming back is no problem.
Plus Lion asks you everytime if you want to save the state or not.
It doesn't make you wrong. Your preferences are your own. But the changes very well could be better for newcomers. At some point you have to abandon old conventions to improve.
I agree, in snow leopard i learned to love 2 finger universal scrolling, with the option of 3 finger navigation between pages and around a document. All of that broke in Lion.
I installed Lion last night and had the same reaction. I wanted to make my disk show up on my desktop so I went to:
- System Preferences -> Desktop (duh!)
- System Preferences -> Appearance (ok...)
- Right click on desktop -> Show view options (surely it's here!)
By the time I finally found it, I had a familiar feeling of low-level frustration that I usually associate with Windows.
The new maximize feature is rather passive-aggressive as well. Instead of something sensible like making option-clicking the '+' maximize the window, they added yet another button which does a needless animation and disables the menu bar and the dock. It almost feels like a fuck-you to people who have been asking for such a feature for years.
Menu bar and dock are still there for your use, drag your mouse to the top of the window or to the bottom. When you click a different app you will be switched to a desktop with that app.
