Sunday, July 24, 2011

Lion install -easy, using Lion -horrible.

Apple released this week Lion and within a few days 1 million people downloaded it. How nice is it to have a company which can make with one product in 3 days $30 million in revenue.

As I wrote in an earlier blog, it was easy to install Lion. But since then I got in many trouble and a lot of expenses. Lion is only $29 and I guess one reason why it is so cheap is that it is now 64bit and no Rosetta. Basically half of my programs got either deleted during install or did not work anymore. I had to buy a new transmit, a new version of parallels (Version 5 does not work with Lion). I had to install a flash beta version etc. People would be more frustrated if Lion would cost $100 and they would need to buy more apps. $29 is just the border line not to get pissed.

Safari as an example does not have flash anymore. Which I would really not care, because I don't like flash, but instead of not displaying the flash piece, the page loads and as soon it comes to the swf file, the page turns white. The Apple developer forum is full of complains.

I love a lot of the new features in Lion, but what the heck is natural scrolling? The standard setting for scrolling is "natural" (as Apple claims). This means when you move your hand down the page goes up, when you move your hand up the page moves down. This is natural when you have two wheels touching each other and one turns up then the other turns down, but guess what my hand is no wheel. And dear Apple developer, take your hand and try to turn a tire you will see that turning your hand down will make the tire turn down.

Folders are now without a scrollbar which irritated me. I first thought I lost files in a folder till i figured out I need to scroll. This is fine when looking at something in full screen, then we assume there might be more, but with a smaller window and no scrollbar, means not more content. But not for Apple.

I did spend another few hundreds to get adobe creative suit cs4 (to save money). Guess what CS3 got reinstalled because of Rosetta. CS4 does crash every other time. I just can't win.

Safari has now a download icon on top right. When you click on something to download it will not anymore open a download window, the only indicator that something is downloading is a blue bar in a mini small icon (at least with a 27 inch screen). Clicking on the download icon opens a bubble, but this bubble is empty, I was expecting to see exactly the download status or at least the files downloading or downloaded. I hope it is only a Safari bug.

To see how much space your hard drive has left is now involved with multiple clicks or you need to open info. Folders do not show anymore how much space is left.

Air drop, will drop from my radar. the idea behind airdrop is, that when two Lion devices are close to each other that they see each other and open a kind of shared volume. My wife has an older MacBook Pro from early 2008. This machine is too old to have air drop. And yes none of the iOS devices have yet neither airdrop.

Speaking older Apples, one good thing with the install was that we have now more hard drive space available on my wife's computer. In total 10GB, because Lion deleted all apps which needed Rosetta.

But Apple was friendly enough to leave the icons in the dock that we know what got deleted. However we don't know what other programs got deleted during install. I could not find a text document or something else to see what got deleted. Guys you can't do this. Inform the user or at least create a document.

Our MacBook Pro has not the multi touch mousepad, therefore it can not take advantage of all the features and Lion is even harder to use.

Apple moved a lot of things around and changed a lot. Lion sounds aggressive and the changes were as such.

When Apple presented Lion, they said that closing and open an app will be fast and the app will recognize what you had last open and will save all the time for you, that the user does not need to care where things get saved.

Unfortunate these features only work yet on Apple products like Safari, keynote etc.

However if you don't have an i5 processor and a SSD drive then you will not like it. A normal hard drive is just too slow and reopen an app takes time and it takes time till a page is loaded again. I closed Safari because a page did hang up. I had 12 tabs open and decided to close safari anyway and so I could get away from 12 tabs. Ten minutes later I opened safari again and guess what, it opened all 12 tabs. Grrrrrrrrrrrr. It is not always good to get to old status back.

LogMeIn has now problems with my computer (since the upgrade) I need to install the plugin every time when I use LogMeIn. It just can't remember that I already have the plugin.

Conclusion:
I love Lion on my iMac, especially new mail program, but I don't like that the OS is still a little in beta (I feel) and I don't like for sure that my wife's MacBook Pro is not powerful enough for Lion. The computer is clearly slower. But it is a 2.6Ghz dual core processor. It is still a power machine (I thought).

I liked that I could install Lion on both machines by paying only once, but I don't like that my wife's computer is now connected to my apple account and credit card. Pretty sure she will find it out soon. BTW this was the only way to buy Lion once and then to download it on her and my computer.


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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

3 comments:

  1. There will be a great profit for Steve Jobs. Yes Lion would be strong OS Further as it is come up with Iphone 4. I was seeing the most update on iphone 5. I am also aware of these competition with Window, Linux and Lion in OS. It would be great competition with them.

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  2. One of my problem got over the window pc. I need to install the Macinstosh into my pc but it can't able to get it install.

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