OS X Lion: Initial Likes & Dislikes

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Its been a little over a week since Apple officially released OS X Lion to consumers and we’ve gotten a chance to user the new operating system extensively. As many others have stated the general feel of the OS is that it’s moving much more in line with iOS and many of its touch interfaces.

Some of the moves make a lot of sense and add a lot of value to users while a few are a bit frustrating. Below our our initial Likes & Dislikes of the new OS.

Likes

  1. Windows Sizing – It only took Apple seven versions of their popular operating system to finally fix windows sizing. Before OS X Lion, the only way to increase the size of a window was to click and drag the bottom right corner. Now, with Lion all sides and corners of all windows can be clicked and dragged to increase or decrease the viewing size. This is a great addition that many new PC converts won’t appreciate nearly as much as long time OS X users.
    lion-windows-sizing.jpg
  2. Spaces Backgrounds – OS X Lion makes it easy to differentiate between your desktop Spaces. Setting a different background for each of your spaces is quick and easy. Now you can not only organize where your apps launch but quickly identify visual which space you’re working in.
  3. Launchpad – Before Lion, the best way to quickly see which apps you had installed on your Mac was through an Applications folder on your doc. Now, Launchpad is a swipe away on your trackpad. Launchpad displays all the Apps you have in your App folder similar to the layout on your iPhone or iPad. Organizing your apps in sub-folders on the screen is also available.
    Finder.jpg

Dislikes

  1. Mouse/Trackpad default settings – I really hate it when user interface controls are switched without informing the user or prompting them for their preference during initial install and configuration. With all previous versions of OS X, scrolling a window was in the direction of movement, meaning to move down a page you scrolled down.

    Now with Lion, the default mouse setting is to have scrolling be in the direction of finger movement. Move your finger up to scroll the content up, move your finger down to scroll the content down.

    It feels inverted to what users are use to.Apple did this to match the user controls of their touch screens and I’m sure makes sense for the long run, but making the change be the default setting for Upgrades will confuse users and make some of them even question if their mouse is broken.

    To turn off this default mouse scrolling configuration Open System Preferences >> Mouse >> and uncheck “Move content in the direction of Finger Movement When Scrolling or Navigating”.

    Mouse-Scolling-Lion-Fix.jpg
  2. Dashboard – I use Dashboard a lot. To quickly pull up a calculator, check the date, and view the weather forecast. I loved the way it was previously implemented as an overlay to the screen you were looking at. It made it so you could quickly calculate numbers you were looking at in other applications and I believed it to be a great resource.Those days are gone.

    Now, with OS X Lion, Dashboard is more like a Space with a bunch of tiny apps running continually. Launching dashboard pushes the Space you’re working into the right and pulls in from the left the collection of small widgets. The background is a default grey and no open Apps can be referenced without jumping back out of Dashboard.I’d love it if Apple made this a user preference instead of forcing us to change the way we used the tool.

Conclusion

Overall OS X Lion has a lot of great new features but it is not without its frustrating updates. What do you love/hate about Apple’s new Operating System?