A gorgeous OS that continue a dribbling decent into lowest common denominator for Apple. So far my first impressions of Lion have been fairly mixed – very excited but bombarded with issues straight up including sudden panic from Chrome and Safari not working or connecting to sites. Disabling extensions, restarting and generally poking things seemed to help initially but after a while Safari tends to stop loading pages.
The left-overs of Spaces
One of the biggest issues so far is flickering windows for application that are set to “Every Space” when you switch Spaces. It seems that these applications are not rendered in the Space until you switch to it, when it jarringly snaps onscreen. Makes switching Spaces feel really really buggy. The Preference Pane to administer Spaces and apps belonging to each is gone so that seems to indicate that this bug is an oversight affecting those upgrading from Snowleopard configured Spaces. I am hoping that I can manually tweak Spaces settings and at least remove them.
I think Apple believes that we can’t organise Spaces on our own an need to be spoon-fed digital baby-food.
A mouse can’t wave!
Magic Mouse doesn’t seem to allow most of the gestures being touted. Hopefully an update will fix this. I don’t know if I can handle the weird reverse scroll thing – I am torn between “giving it a go” and just switching it back to normal.
Lion Java…
So far attempts to install Java have failed both through automatic updates and manual download. The installer just hangs, Not Responding.
iDontChat
Another annoyance that I am yet to solve is iChat. It won’t connect to any accounts gMail or Mobile Me and looks like its not just me. I never really used iChat in the past but wanted to see if there were any changes. Looks like the new feature is not working… brilliant!
Conclusion
I am hopeful that the issues will be confined to annoyances and not extend into deal-breakers though it is very close with Java not installing. The new scrollbars are very awesome and thankfully Safari’s interface is MUCH snappier. Showing/hiding the url bar with cmd+shift+| had a fraction of lag previously. And being able to drag windows from any edge is unexpectedly magnificent. The OS feels like it boots faster.
I really think that installing from scratch is the way to go. The amount of issues I am having I attribute to installing over a year-old, heavily used install of Snow Leopard.
And seriously, why would the 3.8 gig installer get deleted without ASKING me? Or at least just put it in the trash so it can be recovered.
Update 1: Wed 20.07.11 After going for a long walk in preparation to reinstall everything in somewhat of an emergency I came back to see the Java installer had stopped hanging and I was able to install. Perhaps things are going to be ok… Been stressful though.
Also discovered that you can manage Apps in “Desktops” (formally Spaces) by right-clicking icon in the dock. Apps in All Desktops still flick in which is yucky.
Hi Philip, Well I do love your stream of thinking way of blogging, though I have to admit not a lot of it was understood. Like Creative Excellence, that is good! In bed sending this, under doctor’s orders for bedrest, and using a Mini iPad, the iPhone. Could not see the an-
imationon the phone, tomorrow on the laptop. Good luck with your new website, BTW, this is a very easy to maneuver site.
Cheers, Trudi
Hey, did you figure out a workaround for the flickering problem for apps displayed in all spaces ?
Unfortunately I haven’t. I gave up on using “Display in all spaces” for the moment as it seems buggy at worse and really annoying (flickering) at best. Hoping that an update will fix it as it is an OS level problem.