So, the new version of the Mac OS X came out recently. It's called Lion. I read this nineteen page review of it, and I totally want it! Now! Unfortunately, I would need to install the previous OS X, Snow Leopard, in order to install Lion, because of some kind of magic regarding how it partitions some disk space for itself. Oh, I wish I had money, then I would just get a fancy new Mac that already had Lion.....
At first I was a bit distressed to see that they'd really flattened the look of all the buttons and widgets and icons and things, because I liked the candy-coated look of the OS X. But when they got to the part about the scroll bars, I began to think it was really beautiful and clean, like the more recent versions of iTunes. On the whole, I like Apple's design philosophy, and I like that this is more on the sleek side, rather than the cutesy side. The only caveat I have is, they got rid of the clicky arrows for the scroll bars - I hate having to move the mouse if I don't want to, although you can still use the arrow keys of course. However, I think this is more than made up for by the fact that you can resize windows from any edge! Not just the bottom right corner.
It has autosave on everything (everything native, that is, you still have to hit apple-S for most third-party programs). Now, ordinarily, I turn autosave off, because half the time I make changes I'm not sure about, and only save them if I'm sure. I get really paranoid about saving over the good version of things. But Lion makes a previous version every time it saves, so you can go back and recover stuff in a neat new application. It also saves your last window arrangement from the last time you were using it. That is cool. I'm looking at you, Final Cut Pro....
The second half of the review is about technical stuff. I only understood part of it, and it took me a couple nights to get through, but it's pretty amazing how smart they made it. The way it uses memory, the way it allows applications to talk to each other, and the way it lets you customize different screens are all quite cool. As I was reading it, it totally seemed like Tron.
Also, at first it seemed like they were getting it a little too dumbed-down for new users, but the fact that it is actually more customizable than previous Macs, and has much more powerful tools, is awesome. I think it's important for computers to be intuitive enough not to intimidate new (usually old) users, but offer enough depth to get them to do all the stuff you need without jumping through hoops and wasting time.
Yep, if I ever get a real job, the first thing I will buy, even before a new tattoo, will be a sweet new Mac....I can dream can't I?
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The autosave, the saving past versions, the resizing from any corner, and a couple of the other things, are all features Windows has had since at least XP, and I think 2000 had most of them.
ReplyDelete'Course, "Quit" is still something like "Alt+F4" on PCs, so, uh, yeah...
True but the way this handles previous versions and lets you see them all at once is pretty neat. It also autosaves every time you exit a program, which is kind of handy if you have a bunch of stuff open.
ReplyDeleteThe thing I like most about Lion, though, is all the stuff you don't see, like how it handles memory. I wish Mac would improve its UI and its programming guts at the same time, like Windows, instead of having them kind of leapfrog each other. At least none of the Mac OS Xs are strange and buggy (well the first one doesn't count - it was kind of fail) Although recently Windows has gotten over that.