Apple-Orange

So I’ve decided to upgrade to Lion. A few things that I want to note that I haven’t read anywhere else. Of course for the ultimate review check out John Siracusa’s Lion review (19 pages). I actually read his review first before installing lion.

Three finger gestures are broken in the twitter app. I used to be able to swipe three fingers down and up to switch between timeline/mentions/DM/etc, but now I can’t do that anymore. This is because three finger gestures are now registered for Mission Control and App exposé. Btw, exposé has some bugs:

Mail is now really awesome, however conversation is still not as good as gmail conversation view. Gmail had this feature for almost 6 years now, and I don’t think any other competitor got it quite as right as gmail. Gmail sort the messages in a chronological order, whereas Mail now sorts is the other way around. This makes sense for Gmail since it collapses the old mails into just a line of header, but for Mail this is probably the most right behaviour they can get (if they don’t want to collapse the old mails). I also like Gmail’s text box at the end of the messages, when you click on it it’ll automatically create a reply message to the person you’re talking to (regardless who emailed last). I thought Mail can’t show sent messages, but I found out that I can display those by going to preferences, viewing, and tick the box “Include related messages”. Still, Gmail is way better.

Inverted scrolling direction got me confused for 15 minutes. I hesitated to change the preference, because I may want to give this a try. Turned out it’s actually not too bad. If you’re really annoyed by this, I say give it a few hours. I can’t say yet that the inverted scrolling is better than regular scrolling, but right now it’s not much different (If you’re not using a trackpad then don’t worry, switch it back).

Launchpad is good. Many people said it’s whimsical, but I actually use it. I had way too many apps in my dock, so I used TabLauncher in Snow Leopard to keep my dock clean. I have a shortcut to my application folder in my dock, I thought I could get rid of that, but I don’t think so yet. First of all launchpad does not preserve my folder structure in the application folder. Secondly launchpad actually remembers if I’ve opened an app from a folder, and it does not close that folder. It kind of annoys me, because what’s the chance that I’m going to open another app in the same folder? This is the same problem that Lukas Mathis presented.

As much as other people hates auto correction, I actually like it in my iPhone. In Lion auto correction is on by default, but there is one app where I write in such a way I don’t want it to be corrected. Yes, that’s in safari when I’m writing in Facebook. The crazy thing is it took me a while to figure out how to turn it off (it can be turned of system wide in system preferences, or per app), turns out I have to click to on of the text boxes in safari (try to pretend that you want to comment on someone’s status update in Facebook), then you can right click and go to spelling & grammar. I actually don’t hate it that much in Lion. While writing this I actually got corrected a few times. It’ll be nice if they could indicate which words has been auto corrected so it doesn’t look funny in the end.

Spotlight indexing was very slow for me. It showed 36 hours remaining, then 15 hours remaining, then 9 hours remaining, then it was stuck. I unplugged my external hard drive, restart my laptop, and boot back in. Spotlight says 30 minutes remaining and it actually finished within that time. My suggestion is not to connect  your external hard drive while spotlight is indexing, else it’ll try to index that hard drive as well. Do it after spotlight finished with your internal hard drive.

Performance-wise, I don’t feel the machine’s slower. I’m running Intel Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM, 2008 Macbook. It sure doesn’t feel like the ones in Apple store, but runs very well even while opening Eclipse and Safari. I’d say it’s about par with Snow Leopard. Conclusion is, you should probably upgrade. It’s so easy. Just remember to back up your hard drive first. Try to also check your hard drive’s health if you know how to do it.

By the way, if you’re a programmer of any kind, please please pretty please try to implement auto save in whatever programs you’re working on. It can be done for Windows programs and Linux programs too (Lion just gave some nicer API), I don’t think end users should worry about saving anymore. It’s 2011 and people has enough CPU and hard drive to do auto save.