Experiences with Lion
 

I've finally moved over to Lion, and have only been using a short time, but thought I would share my initial experiences.
I have a fast connection, so downloading was not a problem. Installation took about an hour, and the remaining time estimate lied like a cheap watch.

At first launch, I opened a Finder window and got the All My Files thing. I'm not sure quite how useful that's going to be when I've got Spotlight, but we'll see.
I tried to move the Finder window, but the entire Desktop moved, eventually shifting to the Dashboard. I had to change the Trackpad settings to allow 3-finger drag to get thing comfortable.

I tried to get used to the new funny scrolling, but I couldn't. It seems illogical. If I want to see things that are to the right, I move my fingers to the right. If I want to see things that are further up, then I move my fingers up, not down.

I can see I'm going to have to learn and try out a whole bunch of trackpad gestures. I already like the "back" and "forward" swipe in Safari.

My root level Library appears in the Finder, though my home one doesn't. I thought both were hidden. I'll make the home one visible. I had to add my system drive to the sidebar manually, even though my externals were listed there.

The UI is generally a bit more sober than before. Fewer bright colours, square buttons -- which are a bit retro -- but I guess it's all aimed at making the OS a bit less toy-like (ironically, some might say, given the iOS features added).

Mail seems like a big improvement. Though I have lots of emails with the same subject that aren't necessarily conversations, like PayPal notifications, etc.

I really like Resume. I shut my computer down overnight and if I'm going out, so it's a massive timesaver to get back up to speed. It's my computer: I'm the only one who uses it, so I have no problems about things being left open. If I'm doing some secretive, I'll close the window afterwards.

So far, all my apps seem to work well. I had already banished Rosetta on my Snow Leopard installation, and most of my stuff is up-to-date.

I haven't investigated the Auto-Save/Versions thing yet, which I'm sure will take some getting used to. But it's about time that paradigm changed. ("Do you remember when you had to save files manually?")

Things seem a little snappier, as ever, though that might just be upgrade perception, or just the "cleaning" that comes from an install. Memory usage seems about the same. (I have 3GB.) Spotlight did its thing on first launch, but didn't slow down the system or use many resources.

I like the improvements to the Finder: merge folders, Spotlight searches, etc. I'm not too bothered by the UI changes to AddressBook and iCal, though it would be good if you could adjust the colour of that yellow leatherette....

I'm looking forward to investigating the changes to AppleScript and Automator, which look really promising, as someone who would like to get his computer to work for him a bit more.

Preview, again, looks like the killer app, with loads of great features -- adding signatures, opening iWork and Office documents.

I'm running Lion on a 2006 iMac, and it seem fine -- if anything, slightly quicker than 10.6. To sum up: no problems, a few things to get used to, and a lot more investigating and discovery to be done!

Brave man ;-) My Office just works great on Snow and until new hardware graces its presence I am not willing to rock the boat.

I have my Home Server running Lion Server and that is as far as i prepared to go at the moment. Has been OK once you get used to servermgrd going crazy every time you touch it.

I have deployed quite a few Lion machines and have been plagued with issues in Business environments. Although much of this was related to the broken AD "integration" which i might add was broken all the way through beta/10.7 release/10.7.1.

10.7.2 has helped but we are already looking at other options as Apple cannot be trusted. I am still nervous having to drop Lion machines into differing infrastructures as SMB is not right yet & AFP is picky.

However I look forward to Lion being part of my daily life at some point.

While I also have no use for All My Files, I suspect most users don't really use Spotlight. I do wonder, though, if showing everything is of much use to anyone, though it's easy enough to avoid using it.

I gave the new scrolling a week for testing and now I don't notice it. No doubt, the first few days were weird after 25+ years of thinking in reverse of this operation.

I wouldn't say the new UI is bad, but for my tastes the 10.6 UI was perfect. It had a great balance between muted and unobtrusive on one hand with subtle yet clear visual cues. As an example, I though the color of Finder windows was spot on for knowing which window is in the foreground and the colored sidebar icons were visible enough to provide visual guidance without distraction at other times. Likewise, I felt the same about Snow Leopard scroll bars (especially since I used the Graphite appearance color).

Agreed. My only issues have been applications which don't take advantage of Lion features (like Auto Save, etc.).

I'm all for this feature, even though the lack of a Save As option is a frequent source of frustration. The Duplicate option just isn't as helpful and I seem to be having trouble breaking my old habits/expectations.

Same here.

Agreed.

I've always appreciated Preview and used it quite a bit. For me, it does seem slower compared to past versions. I get plenty of files (usually not images, so PDFs or Office files) that it takes a bit longer to open. As in, 5-10 seconds.

I'm running Lion on a 2006 iMac, and it seem fine -- if anything, slightly quicker than 10.6. To sum up: no problems, a few things to get used to, and a lot more investigating and discovery to be done![/QUOTE]

I'm using a MacBook Pro from around the same time, but it's basically the same specs as your machine, or negligibly different, though I benefit from an SSD boot volume.

Good thread.

Can you explain to me how I now do Save As please? Unless, as is possible and even probable, I am missing something, there seem to be far too many steps involved in what was the simple task of Save As/change extension/filename/save location.

TIA

What do you think of 10.7 Server? I use 10.6 Server for web, sql, mail and iCal and am debating the upgrade, mainly due to an extensive investment in scripting various things.

@acme.mail.order
Hi I have a love/hate relationship with it at the moment. I personally will not updating my clients 10.6 servers to 10.7 unless we get new hardware. #unlikely

I have installed 3 Mac Mini Servers in small offices and it is working out Ok but these are very simple setups 10-20 users and very few services. no Mail/MySQL etc.
MySQL has been removed and replaced with PostgresSQL so you will have to hack that.
The web services was a complete car crash in 10.7/10.7.1 , 10.7.2 has helped but Apple are using very complicated Apache setup to work with all the Ruby stuff under the hood.
I like where Profile Manager is going but still has nuances.

I have given up running internal Mail services with my clients so cannot comment on that.
iCal Server/address book server is working OK however still has its quirks.
Wiki i do not use day in day out but seams to work OK.
SUS works fine.
DNS is OK
OD is now working better in 10.7.2 SSL Binds was screwed.

The big one is Server.app which has a mind of its own. Lots of finger tapping while it reads all the config files etc. Very Very Quirky ;-) and hope they sort this out soon.
"Old School" Server Admin tools work OK.

I have not attempted an upgrade from snow to lion server and would think that most things would break !

http://www.apple.com/macosx/server/resources/

http://images.apple.com/macosx/serve...ting_v10.7.pdf

I worked in a large publishing firm that networked Macs to Windows servers, from 10.3 to 10.6, and AD never worked properly. Part of this seemed to be down to Apple and MS not playing nice together; and some of it down to the usual management issues, and the Windows IT support guys not knowing (or caring) about OS X (there were 500 Macs).

I don't envy you!

Lion does seem to have cured a problem I had with highlighting text in 10.6, in which if you deleted some text in the middle of a document, the highlight would stay after you deleted text. And it would be slow to respond to keystrokes immediately after selecting text. (So, if you performed <Cmd>A, <Cmd>C quickly, the copy would not always happen, unless you waited for a bit. I tried removing caches and prefs to no avail. Also a reinstall.

Lion does used more swap, even when there's free memory. Though generally, things do seem snappier, so I'm not worried.

@benwiggy - Have also had battles with AD but do have it working mostly pretty well with Snow. 90% of my install base are on Snow now and mostly all works with hacks. Have a couple of 10.4 servers knocking about still and a few PowerMac G5's running 10.5.8.

I suspect you're not missing anything and are simply encountering the cumbersome experience that it is. Under Lion, we have to use File > Duplicate, then do a File > Save, and we have to switch to the original document (in whatever application we are in) and close that window. Just using the built-in setup of Lion, I don't think there's much else one can do.

For those who use Keyboard Maestro or anything similar, I recommend Pierre Igot's method for re-creating functionality akin to how Save As performed previously. Less convenient (I think) would be to simply duplicate and re-name files in the Finder, and maybe there is a trick or two someone can devise using Automator or AppleScript.

Yes, it seems that Duplicate does not save a file, but creates a new copy in the app's memory, which you then must save.
So the old "Save As" is achieved by Duplicating, and then Saving the dupe.
If Dupe had a keyboard shortcut (Cmd D ....?), then it would be trivial.

I do like the new method, but it does mean getting used to some new ways of doing things:

• If you Close a file, it will get auto-saved, rather than ask you if you want to save or discard the changes.
• I am accustomed to open a file, change it, and then Save it As something. I guess the smart thing to do is to open the original, Dupe it, Save it, and then work on it.

I would think Command-Shift-S is generally now free for use and could be assigned to Duplicate with System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts.

A couple of other thoughts:

The iTunes that came with 10.7.3 was not 10.5, so I had to downloads that again. (as my library was 'too new' for the bundled version.)

I am finding all the grey a bit tedious. It's like System 6 all over again.

I still have quite a few apps that are not updated to take advantage of the new features - though it's good to see Omni products, NeoOffice and others supporting AutoSave and Versions. Resume seems to work with anything.

I like the new Terminal. Lots of cool features there. I like "Paste Escaped Text", which automatically escapes spaces etc in the clipboard text. (You're going to tell me this is an old feature, now, aren't you?)

Sorry to double post:

There are a lot of new fonts in Lion:

Several SE Asian, Arabic, Nepalese fonts, for all your typesetting needs: (Tamil, Telugu, Sinhala, Oriya, Nanum, Myanmar, Malayalam)

A series of "STIX" Unicode fonts containing every conceivable scientific and math characters you could ever need.

PT Sans, which looks like a Russian-based version of Gill Sans.

A .ttc version of Palatino?

Noteworthy, a new scribbly font.

As much as the ability to write in Arabic or Tibetan appeals, it's going to be quite rare in my work, so some way of disabling all the heavy foreign scripts might be nice.
At the moment, I use Font ExplorerX and keep a set of "disabled" fonts, so that I can turn off all the OS X fonts I don't need with one click.

I would have linked this originally had I remembered, but Macworld had a good overview the other day on how the Save As command has been replaced by Duplicate.

Another thing:

If you create a document in TextEdit, and close it without saving, you get a dialog that offers a save location, but also includes "Don't Save" <cancel> "Save" buttons.

Traditionally, <Cmd> D was for Don't Save; but now it moves the file location to the Desktop.

You can revert to the past style of behavior using this Terminal command:

The only problem (at least so far from 10.7.1 to 10.7.2) is that OS updates seem to negate this change and it must be reapplied.

The "new" shortcut for Don't Save is the same as Move to Trash in the Finder, which kind of makes sense: cmd-delete.

Thanks for that. I keep a bash script of all the defaults write commands that I've implemented, so that they can be re-applied from the Script menulet.

This makes re-applying them a doddle.

Oh! That makes sense. I might try to get used to that.

I just tried to add a "dot" to the front of a filename, and the Finder wouldn't let me.
I've never done this in the Finder before -- usually using the Terminal for such files -- but I'm wondering if this is new to Lion, or if it has been there for some time.

I get a dialog saying that "these names are reserved for the System. Choose another."
I always thought the only char you couldn't enter was the colon.

The above behaviour is what I see in Leopard (10.5) as well.
I.e. you can't put a dot at the beginning of a filename using Finder.
But note that you can of course put dots in filenames using Finder, just not at the beginning (since that makes the file hidden in Finder).