OSX 10.7 Lion --------------First Impressions
10/08/11 16:06 Filed in: Computers & Tech
I recently purchased a new iMac, which came with the Snow Leopard operating system. It came with a snazzy new magic mouse which is designed with Apple’s new Lion operating system in mind. So far there are some things I really like about Lion, the new text to speech voices are quite impressive. The number and the quality of them is impressive, all the different languages are also very impressive. There are also some nice improvements in the choice of how individual windows display themselves. You can permanently set a folder full of images to display thumbnail pics and a directory of text files to always display as a list,… I like that! I also really like the new full screen option especially when working on calendars and things that require my full attention. But there were just a few things that weren’t broke, they were perfect as they were but Apple decided to “Fix” them anyhow!
At first I bemoaned the new mail application until I discovered an option to switch it to classic mode! The new and so called improved view presents you with a sea of text which makes it difficult to zero in on the one item you might want to pick out to look at first. So if you’re like me go into preferences and switch to classic, you’ll be glad you did! However there is no such happy fix for the calendar program. I am still baffled by this thing. If you have multiple calendars there’s no way to see which one is active so that when you start a new event, you don’t know which calendar you’re starting it for! I find myself copying other events and editing them for this reason. Attention Stevie-Boy, it’s no good making things pretty if they are impossible to use! I mean, it’s a freaking calendar! It’s about utility not aesthetics!
Now on to this new Magic Mouse, it’s great except when it’s not. If you only want to use OSX and the programs included with OSX it’s super-fantastic-expiallydocious! However try and play a game with this thing and you’re in for a nightmare of epic proportions. I am a musician who frequently performs in the online world known as Secondlife, and I have to use my old mouse whenever I do. If you rub that mouse the wrong way your view zooms 10,000 leagues under the sea or a mile up into the sky with no warning! It’s frustrating as hell! Also because I am playing a guitar and singing there are all sorts of things that I can do with my 2 button PC centric mouse that I can’t with the Magic Mouse. So if you’re yet to take the plunge to buy a new mac might I suggest you go with a regular mouse plus track pad option? This way you can do all the gestures and iPad like flipping of pages when the mood strikes you and then mouse the night away when it doesn’t!
When I got this new iMac I had a laptop, and the hard drives out of my old G5 that exploded in a very non-spectacular failure of the cooling system, and decided to use the migration tool to get my “stuff” from these other systems. The nightmare that resulted is an ongoing and daily problem. Files which were on the other systems are now locked, so I can’t edit them. Lion had created ghosts of the old machines and if I want to access those old files I have to log into those old operating systems as if I was somehow a different user! I thought the point of the migration tool was that it incorporated the data from your old system for use in the new one! In some cases it worked fine, my Garageband Jam packs and other add-on loops worked out just fine, as well as my projects from the other systems. But for some reason all my song lyrics are now locked, for what reason I can’t say! Now I can still view them, but I can’t see any other way of making them editable other than copying the contents and pasting them into a new file. I will have to do this 180 times over the next little while. What’s up with that? I mean really what gives?
So my first impression of OSX Lion is this. If you had just added the new text-to-speech voices to Snow Leopard that would have been fine with me. Other than the new window view improvements I haven’t seen anything I actually use that is any better than it was.
At first I bemoaned the new mail application until I discovered an option to switch it to classic mode! The new and so called improved view presents you with a sea of text which makes it difficult to zero in on the one item you might want to pick out to look at first. So if you’re like me go into preferences and switch to classic, you’ll be glad you did! However there is no such happy fix for the calendar program. I am still baffled by this thing. If you have multiple calendars there’s no way to see which one is active so that when you start a new event, you don’t know which calendar you’re starting it for! I find myself copying other events and editing them for this reason. Attention Stevie-Boy, it’s no good making things pretty if they are impossible to use! I mean, it’s a freaking calendar! It’s about utility not aesthetics!
Now on to this new Magic Mouse, it’s great except when it’s not. If you only want to use OSX and the programs included with OSX it’s super-fantastic-expiallydocious! However try and play a game with this thing and you’re in for a nightmare of epic proportions. I am a musician who frequently performs in the online world known as Secondlife, and I have to use my old mouse whenever I do. If you rub that mouse the wrong way your view zooms 10,000 leagues under the sea or a mile up into the sky with no warning! It’s frustrating as hell! Also because I am playing a guitar and singing there are all sorts of things that I can do with my 2 button PC centric mouse that I can’t with the Magic Mouse. So if you’re yet to take the plunge to buy a new mac might I suggest you go with a regular mouse plus track pad option? This way you can do all the gestures and iPad like flipping of pages when the mood strikes you and then mouse the night away when it doesn’t!
When I got this new iMac I had a laptop, and the hard drives out of my old G5 that exploded in a very non-spectacular failure of the cooling system, and decided to use the migration tool to get my “stuff” from these other systems. The nightmare that resulted is an ongoing and daily problem. Files which were on the other systems are now locked, so I can’t edit them. Lion had created ghosts of the old machines and if I want to access those old files I have to log into those old operating systems as if I was somehow a different user! I thought the point of the migration tool was that it incorporated the data from your old system for use in the new one! In some cases it worked fine, my Garageband Jam packs and other add-on loops worked out just fine, as well as my projects from the other systems. But for some reason all my song lyrics are now locked, for what reason I can’t say! Now I can still view them, but I can’t see any other way of making them editable other than copying the contents and pasting them into a new file. I will have to do this 180 times over the next little while. What’s up with that? I mean really what gives?
So my first impression of OSX Lion is this. If you had just added the new text-to-speech voices to Snow Leopard that would have been fine with me. Other than the new window view improvements I haven’t seen anything I actually use that is any better than it was.
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