Macintosh OS 10.7: Lion

Another two years go by, another Mac osx upgrade, thusly do we measure the passage of our years.

My thoughts. I was not in a hurry to upgrade. First, I did not see a huge improvement between 10.6 and 10.7. Second, I was not in a locale which allowed for large downloads, however, this has all changed and last night I did the deed.

First thoughts: not much to get excited about, and a few minor annoyances. The reverse scrolling for one. Back in the old days, when one scrolled downwards with two fingers on the trackpad the window in which one was scrolling moved upwards, with 10.7 it is the opposite. This mimics both ios and ‘real’ life, so I am told, however, I do not like this ‘feature’, which I reversed.

There is also a general dumbing down present in the new os. Apple wants to make the os transparent, akin somewhat to ios, where file and folders do not exist, at least for the user. For example, where is my drive? By default it is not visible in Lion. I am long past the geek phase of my life, but come on, I like to see something and to be able to do some things.

Another small annoyance, side bar colours. In the good old days the osx finder sidebar had coloured icons. The colours made finding and identifying the different icons easier, now they are all a muted grey. This is doubly annoying as in days gone by grey indicated a non-operational feature. Bring back the colours. Also on the interface, the three little buttons thingees on top of the os windows are now smaller. These buttons exit, hide and maximise the window, great, but the small buttons are slightly more difficult to click.

I am also disappointed about the lack of a speed boost. I assumed that with two years to play around with the os that there would be a small performance increase, but no.

After two days of use I find that most of the changes I am making to the default Lion layout are intended to make Lion look like Snow Leopard. I can find nothing in Lion that I want, and several things I do not. Disappointed.

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