Generally speaking, you’ll find two types of OS X Lion review online. One will have involved the reviewer living with beta versions and then updating the review on launch day, to see if bugs are squashed; the other will be the result of a day or two’s intensive usage, trying to force the OS to breaking point in double-quick time.

Both techniques have their benefits and drawbacks, but it’s fairly rare for reviewers to be able to use any application for a really solid chuck of time and then report on how it impacts on day-to-day usage. But that’s what I’m able to do on the blog, due to not being on deadline to myself; and with quite a few Twitter followers responding to my Lion whining, I figured I’d provide an overview of my thoughts so far, having installed Lion on my work iMac a week ago. (For comparison’s sake, the system is a 3.2 GHz i3 with 12 GB of RAM.)

The good

• Quick Look. Apple’s preview technology alone made Leopard worth the upgrade fee. In Lion, it’s been upgraded in two particularly important ways. First, it now works in Spotlight, which speeds up searches. Secondly, the main Spotlight window resizes, where possible, according to the content it’s showing. The UI’s also changed, with the black background turning white. I thought I’d hate this, but it turns out to be a smart design move, because the new interface distracts less from the content.
• Mail. At first, I considered reverting Mail back to its classic view, thinking Apple’s new iPad-style layout was taking things a bit too far, but then I changed my mind. Having given the Dock a much bigger go in recent months, I’ve discovered that Apple’s way of doing things can work out well if you don’t fight it too much (and, in the Dock’s case, also use some Terminal commands—I’ve added separators to the apps area and a couple of custom stacks for recent apps and docs). In iPad-style two-pane mode, with my important parent folders added to Mail’s toolbar as drop-downs, I’m very happy with Mail. It feels faster and more efficient than the old version, and the conversation threading is pretty good. There are issues with customisation (fonts in the messages list cannot be amended, which is pretty stupid, and keyboard page-up/down is disabled in the same list), but I’ve very rarely found myself showing the mailbox column and I’m happily getting to grips with the far more advanced search functionality.
• Full-screen mode. This is more a feature that I can see the potential of than one I actually use. It’s certainly a great idea for anyone with small screens, because it provides the means to focus and maximise screen real estate for a document. (Whatever you’ve read, the full-screen mode is often more doc-based than app-based—open two Numbers spreadsheet and they each get a separate navigable screen, rather than you switching ‘windows’.) On a 27-inch iMac… well, I’m less impressed, but that’s largely down to Apple’s inability to design its applications in an adaptive manner. Safari and Mail both prove pointless on such a display, with acres of space around content, although iCal works pretty well. Numbers and Scrivener are two more apps I now use almost exclusively in full-screen mode.
• Speed. Post-install, Lion was barely usable as Spotlight reindexed the system. And then it continued being pretty unusable. One reboot later and everything was fine; generally, the system seems a little faster for most tasks, with only animations providing the impression that certain actions are slower.
• App restore. Those apps that support it now start up in the same state as you quit them. This is particularly useful for Safari, which is still a massive memory hog and needs restarting a few times every day. Now, you can quit and restart without losing any tabs and without having to mess about restoring windows and tabs manually. During crashes, I’ve also found apps supporting this feature reliably restore work, which, given my note in ‘the bad’ is just as well.
• All My Files. The new default Finder window view has pissed off some Mac users (although it can be changed to your home folder or any other location), but it’s useful. You get a bunch of mini Cover Flow rows, each containing a specific file type, with the most recent items at the left. It’d be more useful if this powered-up ‘recent items’ list spoke to third-party apps (so ‘Music’ would show whatever iTunes had recently played, for example), and it’s not very configurable in terms of which rows are shown and their sort order, but I’m nonetheless finding it a worthy addition.

The bad

• Wi-Fi. While my router’s not the most robust model in the world (top tip: never buy Belkin), it usually goes for longish periods before needing a reboot. Under Snow Leopard, the Mac only very rarely had problems connecting. Since OS X Lion arrived, the connection attempt times out after waking from sleep every single time. I’ve tried numerous tips to fix this, to no avail, bar removing all USB hard drives before sleeping the Mac (which has helped some people). Like most OS problems, I can’t imagine this is affecting a particularly large number of users, but others on my Twitter feed have similar issues and one thread on the Apple support site was well over 40 pages long last time I looked. Problems range from ad-hoc login problems through to complete Wi-Fi failure, so I’ve apparently not got it that bad, despite having to waste five minutes every time my Mac wakes. (Note: while 10.7.1 fixed this issue for some people, it hasn’t for me.) Update: I finally got around to replacing my Belkin with a DrayTek Vigor 120 and Airport Extreme. This morning, the Mac woke and connected to the network for the first time since Lion was installed. Therefore, I guess there are issues with the way in which OS X Lion, my Mac’s hardware and the Belkin N1 communicate; that said, the hardware was all working fine under Snow Leopard, and with the sheer number of Wi-Fi-oriented complaints across the web, I still think this is a point that counts against Lion.
• Launchpad. To be fair, Launchpad could be good, but it’s currently half-baked. On iOS, this means of launching and managing apps makes some sense; on the Mac, the launch aspect works well enough, but the almost total lack of options is infuriating. You can’t sort apps automatically (you can only drag them individually), nor can you hide them without the help of third-party add-ons. On an iPhone, you merely have to put up with a few stock Apple apps, but on the Mac, installers and all manner of other crap show up. And while click-hold wiggles the icons, ready for deletion, this only works with apps installed using the Mac App Store. The entire thing reminds me of what would happen if you took DragThing, dumbed it down, then dumbed down the result of the dumbing down, and then continued doing this for an entire night, just because.
• Mission Control. I’m also finding this half-baked. The idea is to give you an overview of what’s running on your Mac, including full-screen documents and apps. In reality, the grouped windows aren’t terribly useful, because they overlap and don’t enable you to expand them, nor can you navigate the windows using the keyboard. Mercifully, Quick Look support remains, and Exposé is still in place on a per-app basis.
• The Mac App Store. Maybe it’s my machine, but the Mac App Store in Lion runs like crap. It’s so slow and locks up constantly. It makes buying apps—something so simple in Snow Leopard—a chore.
• Scrolling. Apple’s ditched scrollbars and reversed scrolling direction in OS X Lion, to ape iOS; so you now use gestures to ‘push’ content in the direction you want it to move. That in and of itself isn’t too bad, but one thing I’ve learned this past week: you’re screwed unless you’re running a fairly recent Mac laptop or have a Magic Trackpad. The mouse isn’t enough to comfortably deal with gestures. By beef with the system, though, is largely its inconsistency regarding fallbacks. In Mail, you cannot scroll the messages list by paging up and down, so you’re forced to use gestures—unlike in iTunes; in iTunes, scrollbars don’t appear for mouse-grabbing on hover—unlike in Safari. And so on. The inconsistency isn’t great for such an important system component, nor is bringing over one of iOS’s worse failings: system-wide hidden mystery content. Want to know if there’s more to see in a document? Tough. You’ll have to wiggle the current page to check.
• The grey. OS X Lion is very grey. Toolbars are grey. Sidebar icons are grey. It’s very dull. I’m sure some graphic designers will like the lack of distraction, but I often use colours for navigation cues, and most of them are now gone, which is a huge pity. Finder’s sidebar also no longer displays custom icons for folders, adding to hunt-and-peck issues rather than improving navigation.
• Stability. I’ve had many crashes for previously stable apps under OS X Lion, including Numbers, TextEdit and Preview. I suspect this might in part be down to the new Resume feature, which, as previously noted, at least tends to put things back as they were on a relaunch.

The ugly

• iCal. Seriously, what the fuck is going on with iCal, Apple? Skeuomorphic design might be the in-thing on the iPad, but were Mac users really complaining that iCal was tricky to use and yelling, “If only Apple would make it look a bit like a tacky leather calendar, like the iPad’s Calendar app, but worse, everything would be all right”. It’s hideous UI design; worse, it looks cheap and out of place alongside the slick, streamlined Mail (and even iCal’s own preferences, which look fine). And this is a pity, because iCal gets two things very right: the much-improved Day view, with its upcoming events list, and the ‘heat’ Year view, using colour to show how busy you are on each day. I use it in full-screen mode and try to avoid the leather.
• Address Book. Yeah, they wrecked this one, too, making it simultaneously look like a Fisher-Price app and reducing its usability. Still, I guess we should think ourselves lucky: at least Mail didn’t suddenly turn into an on-screen mailbox, or force you to lick virtual stamps by swiping your Magic Touchpad with your tongue.

And the rest

There are some other aspects of Lion that I’m either not bothered about either way (the increase in gestures) or haven’t really used enough to comment on (Auto Save, Versions, Air Drop). Overall, despite the fairly balanced ‘good’ and ‘bad’ lists above, I’m actually pretty happy with Lion, not least since its £20.99 price-tag is reasonable. In fact, if it wasn’t for the Wi-Fi issue, I think I’d happily dismiss the other problems, apart from the visual-design disaster that is iCal.

What I do believe is essential with Lion, though, is an ability to rethink workflow. If you’re absolutely set in your ways, you’re screwed. It might not seem it from screen grabs, but this OS really does change a whole bunch of things. You need a trackpad. You need to realise Apple’s default method of scrolling is probably going to be the only method next time round. You need to go with the flow with the likes of Mail and iCal, because Apple’s not going to change its mind.

Also, with the Wi-Fi issues lots of users are experiencing, I strongly recommend you follow my advice and clone your Mac before upgrading, just in case you end up being one of the unlucky ones who cannot connect at all.

Joanna Stern on the Samsung Series 7 Slate PC:

It literally has the guts of a high-end laptop, including a dual-core Core i5-2467M processor, 4GB of RAM, and a 64 or 128GB SSD.

Oooh. Well, oooh, if you care about specs, which most people don’t these days. So, um TECHIEOOOH.

Yet despite those organs, it is said to have over six hours of battery life.

iPads of course clock in at over six hours, too; in fact, they nearly double that. Still, Apple kit’s a rip-off, so maybe the Samsung tablet will at least be affordable.

The 64GB version, which comes with a stylus

Extra value in a losable pointing stick!

will ring up at $1,099.

Just like the iPad, if you buy an iPad 2 while simultaneously setting fire to $400.

Samsung’s done a very nice job of cramming all those components into a .5-inch and sub two-pound tablet.

Thereby making it only merely nearly twice as heavy as the iPad.

[T]he biggest problem is the software, and while the pen and keyboard make Windows 7 more palatable, finger input remains a huge issue. In my short time with it, I mistakenly poked the minimize window button rather than the maximize and struggled to dig out the Paint program from the Start Menu. Samsung is trying to improve things with its Launcher program, which is basically a series of app homescreens, but that skin doesn’t go very deep. Your best bet here is to keep the pen in hand.

Sounds great. So what’s the verdict?

[T]he Series 7 Slate may be the best Windows 7 tablet ever made

Sounds a bit like someone waggling a smallish stick and saying it’s the best stick you could poke yourself in the eye with. I’m still struggling to get Microsoft’s tactics. It has a great OS in Windows Phone that looks like it would be perfect for tablets, but, no, instead they’re still trying the same ‘normal Windows on a tablet’ thing that’s proven to have failed badly for years now.

Hey, Ballmer: 2001 called and wants its concepts back!

Hat tip: Curious Rat.

During the spate of articles about Steve Jobs stepping down as Apple CEO, one of the major aspects of his success was put down to an ability to say no. This leaves Apple products with fewer features than those from its rivals, but, typically, superior usability and focus. The blog post Improvements in Windows Explorer rather starkly highlights the opposite approach. It traces the lineage of Microsoft’s file manager, from its hideous beginnings in Windows 1.0 through to the arrival of sanity in Windows XP. But then you get to Windows 8.

Over the years, Explorer has grown to support a number of different scenarios, many unrelated to file management – launching programs, viewing photos, playing videos, and playing music, to name just a few. We wanted to know which of these capabilities customers were really using. Using telemetry data, we were able to answer the question of how the broadest set of customers use Explorer in aggregate. As a reminder, the telemetry data is opt-in, anonymous, and private, but it does represent hundreds of millions of sessions from all customer types.

This data is pretty interesting. First it shows that even though there are over 200 commands in Explorer, customers use a small number of them with any real frequency: the top 10 commands represent 81.8% of total usage. Additionally it shows us that people overwhelmingly use Explorer for core file management tasks – the top 7 commands (72.2% of usage) are all for managing/manipulating files.

Apple’s clearly done similar testing with its applications over the years, in an effort to streamline. Finder has, if anything, simplified during OS X’s evolution. Therefore, it seems someone removed logic from the equation in allowing Microsoft’s Explorer team to do this:

To be fair, the Ribbon can be hidden in Explorer, and that’s just as well, because Microsoft’s created a horrible mess that will intimidate newcomers: instead of concentrating in the “top 10 commends [that] represent 81.8% of total usage”, this new interface flings tons of options in your face. It’s also hard to tally this vision of the future of computing not only with Apple’s iOS but also Microsoft’s own Windows Phone OS, which is currently being smashed into Windows 7 with a hammer, to create the hybrid OS that Steve Ballmer seems to think everyone wants.

Perhaps Microsoft will emerge victorious. Maybe people really do want to run the ‘full’ version of Excel on a tablet device rather than the sleek and simpler Numbers on an iPad. But I’ve a sneaking suspicion the kind of craziness and chaos showcased in the Microsoft blog post rather shows the opposite. It’s complexity for the sake of it, and showcases an inability to say no to including something, ‘just in case’ a few users might need it.

Fucking hell. That nicely sums up my reaction to AllThingsD’s article stating that Apple’s canned TV rentals. Being British, a mystical place called ‘overseas’ that whoever does Apple’s media deals isn’t entirely sure actually exists and therefore largely ignores, I had to use a sneaky US account to access TV rentals on the Apple TV. And here’s what happened:

• 48 episodes of Lie to Me rented ($47.52)
• 48 episodes of Castle rented ($47.52)
• A bunch of miscellaneous rentals of Grey’s Anatomy and random other shows (about $100)

Without Apple TV rentals, we (Mrs G and I) would have probably never discovered and watched Lie to Me. Grey’s Anatomy… we were acquiring that by ‘other means’ before the 99-cent rentals rendered that pointless. And Castle? Well, we love Castle, but not enough to spend loads of cash on it. We’d have waited for the inevitable DVD firesale in the UK or US and picked it up for bugger all—and certainly than for less of the price of the iTunes rentals.

Apple’s laughable spin is that “customers have shown they overwhelmingly prefer buying TV shows”, but that’s bullshit. While reaction to my complaints about Apple binning TV rentals on Twitter shows this is certainly the case for some people, it isn’t for others; more likely, the studios holding back their content was to blame, leaving the rental selection in a pitiful state, especially towards the end. And at the same time the likes of Warner Bros. were arguing 99-cent rentals devalued their content, they were of course allowing Netflix users to download as much as they liked for eight bucks per month. Classy.

So, where does this leave anyone who loves TV? Well, you now have the following choices:

• Pay for hugely expensive cable or satellite, which gives you tons of crap and a few shows you actually care about.
• Pay over the odds for shows on iTunes: £2.49 ($4) per HD episode, in the UK.
• Grab waste-of-resources Blu-rays or DVDs when they show up or, if you’re savvy, hang on for the sales, and then try to figure out how to fit your ever-growing collection in your home.
• Visit the naughty web and say “screw you” to the studios.

Me, I’ll probably head for the third of those options now, but I’m sorely tempted by the fourth. The thing is, I actually want to pay for good shows and support those who make them, but the studios aren’t making it easy. I’m not paying twice as much for a series of House on iTunes as it costs on DVD, but I’m also not exactly thrilled by the prospect of buying more discs-in-card-boxes that waste resources and take up space. I also don’t really care to download content that I then ‘own’ and that takes up hard drive space when I only watch the vast majority of shows once. (Note to US readers yelling “But what about iCloud?”, Brits will only get app and book sync initially—we’re left out of the media-streaming excitement.)

So, yeah, thanks, Apple and thanks, greedy studios. Maybe one day the studios will wake up and realise that 99p or so would be a sensible price-point for a TV show, but I won’t hold my breath. (Even many games companies don’t seem to understand that popular products sell way more copies when they’re cheap, otherwise Pac-Man would always be 69p, rather than rather more ambitiously priced.) Also, take this surrender by Apple as a possible shot across the bows regarding digital movie rentals. As I said a couple of weeks back, they’re now being removed from iTunes with alarming speed, to drive up purchases that are often costlier than grabbing a DVD. It wouldn’t shock me if Apple quietly decides to trash that aspect of the iTunes Store, while being strong-armed by the studios, under the excuse that people want to ‘own’ their movies.

I’ve written about PCWorld writer Katherine Noyes before, responding to her bleating on about how rubbish tablets are, but today she’s decided, in the wake of Steve Jobs resigning, she knows what’s right for Apple:

Now that Jobs has stepped down, however, Apple has a great opportunity. Rather than maintain its completely closed and locked-down approach to the technologies it makes, the time is right for Apple to open up. Besides creating a more sustainable strategy for Apple, such a move would perform a great service for consumers, businesses and the world.

Fair enough, Katherine. Maybe if Apple takes your advice it might just make great products that loads of people buy, leading to profitability, longevity and—if it’s very lucky—becoming one of the biggest companies in the world.

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