Anyone Else Installed OS X Lion Yet?

[gb2000ie]

Just wondering if any of the other Mac users on the forum here have made the jump to the next cat yet? If you have, I'm curious to hear your thoughts!

Bart.

 

[funkylowlife]

nope, i havent but from what i hear, lion only has superficial changes like more "app-like" interface and scrolling, and thats about it.

and im not sure bout this but i heard you can only upgrade to lion from snow leopard, which is crap because i'm still running on leopard and if i wanna change to lion i would need to upgrade it twice. i dont think it was worth paying twice the upgrade for such minimal change.

 

[SimplyJakeAndAlex]

Just wondering if any of the other Mac users on the forum here have made the jump to the next cat yet? If you have, I'm curious to hear your thoughts!

Bart.

GB??? Really You :rofl: A Mac user? Oh I am shocked :rofl::rofl::rofl:

 

[hawtsean]

GB??? Really You :rofl: A Mac user? Oh I am shocked :rofl::rofl::rofl:

I guess it happens, even in the best of families!

 

[gb2000ie]

nope, i havent but from what i hear, lion only has superficial changes like more "app-like" interface and scrolling, and thats about it.

and im not sure bout this but i heard you can only upgrade to lion from snow leopard, which is crap because i'm still running on leopard and if i wanna change to lion i would need to upgrade it twice. i dont think it was worth paying twice the upgrade for such minimal change.

Actually - the big changes are mostly in new features rather than in new look. At first glance, you won't see much change.

The big things for me:
1) built-in full disk encryption that's really easy and very well thought out, as well as support for encrypting external drives too
2) System-wide auto-correct that's very nicely implemented, when it makes a change it underlines it in blue to show it's done something, and it remembers what you had typed as long as that blue is there, so you can revert if it got it wrong (which is doesn't do often unless you REALLY fat-finger it badly)
3) system-wide auto-save and automatic doent versioning (not supported in all apps just yet, but more every day) - no need to hit save, just like on the iPhone you just do stuff and it's safe. As soon as you pause in typing or switch to another app your stuff is saved. Your previous save points are retained for 2 weeks (by default), so you can show the current and all previous versions side-by-side, and even copy and paste between them - this is fantastic for all those times you accidentally destroy an important file (I've been known to do that a lot)
4) Apps save state when they're closed like on the iPhone (not all apps yet, but more and more of them each day) - everything is remembered, which files you had open (even ones you never saved), where all your inspectors were, even where the cursor was - and this happens at an OS-wide level, so if you reboot, all your windows in all the apps that have support will be right back where you left them even after a reboot
5) lots and lots of multi-touch gestures added to help you navigate all your windows and spaces etc.

As for cosmetic stuff, here's some of the highlights there:
1) Exposee, Spaces, and Dashboard have been merged into a single interface called Mission Control, it comes with a button on the Dock, but that's not how you want to use it, you want to tie it to a hot corner or to a multi-touch gesture or mouse button (this works well with gaming mice, old Mighty Mice from Apple, the new Magic Mouse from Apple, and the Magic TrackPad, as well as all laptop trackpads)
2) Full screen apps - when you make an app full screen it becomes a desktop of it;s own, so it's as if a special space was made for it in the old OS X Spaces. You can use gestures or key combos (ctrl+left or right) to navigate between the full-screen app and your other apps or the Dashboard. This is true full screen where you see nothing but that app like on the iPhone, and it's amazing for getting things done. When you don't want distractions you just full-screen the app your working in and you're free to get on with shit
3) An optional new app launcher that is basically like an iPhone home screen for your Mac - all your app icons are there, and you can re-arrange them into multiple screens and into folders. This is great for people who are used to having a Windows desktop full of icons, or for people who thing the dock is too small for all their stuff, and who don't use SpotLight or third party app launchers to launch apps (I never use it, but it is nice, and you can bring it up with a gesture or a custom mouse button or a hot corner)
4) the scrolling change - I just ADORE natural scrolling and the removal of scroll bars, but some people won't want to change so you can change both settings back to the old way if you like
5) Some little UI tweaks - no more childish rounded buttons and progress bars, instead things have gone a little more mature and square looking - most people won't care about this, but I like it a lot. There are also loads more animations when things appear and and disappear - some people won't like them, but they are very quick so they don't waste time.

That's just the really big stuff, there are also lots of totally re-designed apps, like Mail and iCal, and of course for people coming form Leopard the App Store will be new.

As for how you upgrade, right now this second, you need to upgrade through 10.6 to get to 10.7 from 10.5, but that's going to change within the next few weeks. Apple have announced they'll be selling a full version of Lion on a USB thumb Drive for $69 "next month (they said in mid-July)", so if you wait for that you get to go straight from Leopard to Lion. I upgraded my parent's machine as a double-upgrade and it worked flawlessly and in less than 2 hours.

I've been running Lion for a few weeks now, so if you have any specific questions please ask.

BTW - as a Leopard user you're goning to need to upgrade to at least 10.6 in the next few weeks, Apple only support 2 OSes at a time, so Leopard is now end of life as far as security updates etc are concerned.

Laters,

B.

 

[gb2000ie]

GB??? Really You :rofl: A Mac user? Oh I am shocked :rofl::rofl::rofl:

Why? I'm a Linux sysadmin, and Mac OS X is the best desktop Linux/Unix out there. Easier to use than Windows, and a full POSIX OS under the hood with access to all the Linux stuff I use all the time on my servers. I can use my desktop as a development platform without effort, and it means I don't have to put up with UIs designed by nerds for nerds. I adore Linux, I wouldn't dream of putting anything else on a server (except BSD Unix), but I hate open source UI design because it sucks - so the Mac is the best of both worlds for me.

B.

 

[kenmasters]

I;ve installed it and it was fine,
startup and bootcamp works faster,
Apple likes to implement what they think is better upon everyone, which is extremely annoying, like reversing the scrolling on computers, for no good reason, but other then that, you wont find anything out of the ordinary, leopard and lion is basically the same, think of it as a service pack in windows, only you hafta pay for it.

 

[gb2000ie]

I;ve installed it and it was fine,
startup and bootcamp works faster,
Apple likes to implement what they think is better upon everyone, which is extremely annoying, like reversing the scrolling on computers, for no good reason, but other then that, you wont find anything out of the ordinary, leopard and lion is basically the same, think of it as a service pack in windows, only you hafta pay for it.

I've never seen a Windows service pack add as many features as Lion does. Also, I've never seen a Windows version cost as little as Lion does. Lion is much more like the move from Windows Vista to Windows 7 than like a service pack.

As for the scrolling, it's not at all without good reason, there is a lot of logic behind it, and, they have given conservatives the ability to avoid change if they like.

So, what are the logical reasons for the scrolling change?
1) scrolling on OS X now matches scrolling on iOS, so there is a nice consistency across all Apple devices
2) The way scrolling was implemented originally makes not sense! Yes, we all got used to it, so we all developed muscle memory for it, but did it really make any sense? What you were doing was using a scroll wheel to control a scroll bar which controlled the movement of a page. That extra layer of indirection inverted the action. You moved up to go down. Apple have taken out the middle-man, you now control the doent, not the scrollbar that controls the doent.

Yes, it is a change, and yes, some people are very conservative and can't stand change, but no, it is not illogical or without reason.

B.

 

[SimplyJakeAndAlex]

Why? I'm a Linux sysadmin, and Mac OS X is the best desktop Linux/Unix out there. Easier to use than Windows, and a full POSIX OS under the hood with access to all the Linux stuff I use all the time on my servers. I can use my desktop as a development platform without effort, and it means I don't have to put up with UIs designed by nerds for nerds. I adore Linux, I wouldn't dream of putting anything else on a server (except BSD Unix), but I hate open source UI design because it sucks - so the Mac is the best of both worlds for me.

B.

Ahhhh that explains it... I recall my old time as a unix/linux admin... I tempered with one of the first independant linux built before Redhat, it was Caldera Linux... if you remember it

 

[gb2000ie]

Ahhhh that explains it... I recall my old time as a unix/linux admin... I tempered with one of the first independant linux built before Redhat, it was Caldera Linux... if you remember it

I was a late-comer to Linux really - I started as a happy DOS user, then moved on a little reluctantly to Win95, was cranky for a while till I found WinNT4, then was happy on Win2K, and then got very pissed off with Microsoft when they started down the whole activation and windows genuine (dis)advantage route. Just as I was getting pissed off at Micosoft I was also getting more heavily involved in the computer society in college, who ran all their servers on FreeBSD and Debian Linux. Given my growing interest in and experience with Linux, and my ever increasing grumpiness at Microsoft's antics, I moved all my desktop machines over to Fedore Core (then at 1.0), and was happy with that for a while, until I was introduced to the Mac as a grad student. By then I had a lot of Linux and Unix experience, and found the Mac to be the perfect nerd OS (for the reasons listed above), after using OS X (10.3 Panther at the time) for a while in college, I bought the first MacMini when it came out, and have never bought anything but Macs since.

B.

 

[Grenter]

Cool

 

[bernardo]

Thanks for the tips and ideas.

 

[name]

I would rather hear about people reinstalling Lion or installing it on a new machine. Because, you know, no DVD and only USB stick.

 

[gb2000ie]

I would rather hear about people reinstalling Lion or installing it on a new machine. Because, you know, no DVD and only USB stick.

Once you install Lion you have a recovery partition on your disk, so re-installing is easier than if you have a DVD, and if you really want a DVD then you can burn one by extracting the ISO from inside the installer package and burning it yourself.

Also, if you go ahead and buy the USB thumb drive, then there is absolutely no difference at all to using a DVD except that it will work on machines without optical drives. BTW - the USB sticks are not new, that's how the OS has been supplied with MacBook Airs for a while now.

B.

 

[SimplyJakeAndAlex]

I was a late-comer to Linux really - I started as a happy DOS user, then moved on a little reluctantly to Win95, was cranky for a while till I found WinNT4, then was happy on Win2K, and then got very pissed off with Microsoft when they started down the whole activation and windows genuine (dis)advantage route. Just as I was getting pissed off at Micosoft I was also getting more heavily involved in the computer society in college, who ran all their servers on FreeBSD and Debian Linux. Given my growing interest in and experience with Linux, and my ever increasing grumpiness at Microsoft's antics, I moved all my desktop machines over to Fedore Core (then at 1.0), and was happy with that for a while, until I was introduced to the Mac as a grad student. By then I had a lot of Linux and Unix experience, and found the Mac to be the perfect nerd OS (for the reasons listed above), after using OS X (10.3 Panther at the time) for a while in college, I bought the first MacMini when it came out, and have never bought anything but Macs since.

B.

Did my first university degree on a power mac... but I went and study Assemble and VB3 back then had to move back to PC... but I understand what you mean with Microsoft and their stupid control. But even though I can administer Unix servers I have been managing Solaris OS and Sun Microsystem for over a decade I've got lazy LOL and decided to go with windows, NT, 2K, 2003 but that's where I stopped because their stupid windows server 2008 it's just like having Vista with active directory capability... a server OS shouldn't be that heavy IMO :cheers:

Frankly more and more I look at this I am getting old LOL damn my first personal PC was Commodore Vic 20, then TRS 80, Tandy 1000, ATA80286, 386, 486, Pentium 75... did not go for the Pentium 50. In the same time the first IBM AS/400 Server came out... ahh souvenirs we are very geek frankly that's horrible LOL

 

[seantx10]

yeah i installed Lion yesterday on my iMac. i thought it was great until i tried to open my Quicken 2004 program which has all my bank ledgers on it and it says it no longer supports PowerPc apps ......and also my fav game from Gamehouse.com.....SuperMahjong is no longer supported either, so.....is there any way of either uninstalling Lion in order to retrieve my data from Quicken or what should i do?
thanks for any help....

 

[gb2000ie]

Did my first university degree on a power mac... but I went and study Assemble and VB3 back then had to move back to PC... but I understand what you mean with Microsoft and their stupid control. But even though I can administer Unix servers I have been managing Solaris OS and Sun Microsystem for over a decade I've got lazy LOL and decided to go with windows, NT, 2K, 2003 but that's where I stopped because their stupid windows server 2008 it's just like having Vista with active directory capability... a server OS shouldn't be that heavy IMO :cheers:

Frankly more and more I look at this I am getting old LOL damn my first personal PC was Commodore Vic 20, then TRS 80, Tandy 1000, ATA80286, 386, 486, Pentium 75... did not go for the Pentium 50. In the same time the first IBM AS/400 Server came out... ahh souvenirs we are very geek frankly that's horrible LOL

BTW - had to admin Solaris for a while too - it's EVIL! Linux is such a breadth of fresh air compared to Solaris

The first family computer we had was a 386 clone made by Commodore, it had 4MB of RAM, a 16MHz of CPU, and a 40MB hard disk. The first computer that was mine, rather than a family computer, was a second had P75 into which I put 32MB of RAM and two 500MB hard drives, giving a total of one whole gigabyte!

The first time I ever bought a new computer was not until I bought that original MacMini in early 2005.

B.

 

[hawtsean]

In the same time the first IBM AS/400 Server came out... ahh souvenirs we are very geek frankly that's horrible LOL

My younger brother writes AS/400 programming, and runs several of these nice mainframes for a fabric manufacturer. He tells me that IBM has a very neat Windows emulator that lets almost the entire power of an AS/400 be used in a simple GUI, as well as allowing many programs written for Windows NT/2K/XP to run as native. Wish I could afford a toy like that for my home office!!!. I played with an advanced audio/video workstation that ran on a Sun SPARC system. Didn't have to admin or tweak it, just operate it, so that seemed straightforward.

 

[shiggy]

My younger brother writes AS/400 programming, and runs several of these nice mainframes for a fabric manufacturer.

Just to be an annoying git (sorry), but an AS/400 isn't a mainframe, it's a mini .... for a 'nice' mainframe, you need something in the system z line.

Though I haven't used a '400 in while, the Command Language was quite quirky, I always thought it was, 'think of what you want to do' then (mostly) take out the vowels and type it in.... easy... as long as you though of Power Down System (PWRDWNSYS) rather than shut down ...

 

[hawtsean]

Just to be an annoying git (sorry), but an AS/400 isn't a mainframe, it's a mini .... for a 'nice' mainframe, you need something in the system z line.

Correction accepted. I'm nowhere near the level of using or abusing any of IBM's toys, mini or mainframe.