Dropsafe

by Alec Muffett

On Moving to Lion: Spaces and Mission Commander

Toe in the water time…

I blew-away my MacBookAir last night, reformatted it, reinstalled SnowLeopard to a known-sane config, and then upgraded it to Lion.

Result: grmph.

It’s okay, it’s different, I can see that what they think they are doing is trying to unify iPhone and Desktop experiences… but I am very glad that I didn’t dive in on my server.

The big thing for me is “Spaces” – I use 16 of them in my workflow, and more than 10 are usually occupied by different apps, arranged in a 2D grid so I know “Mail” is top-left, “IM and Twitter” the two below that, and so forth.

In Mission Commander, that’s all fucked up gone unified; the spaces are strung out in a long / linear row, their ordering randomly automatically changes in a MRU fashion, you cannot manually reorder (apparently coming in 10.7.2) and I can’t seem to “name” them other than the default “Desktop 1/2/3/4…” which means I have to squint to ensure I am selecting the correct one.

Or sweep through them all like on an iPhone.

I won’t be upgrading any more machines for quite some time.

⊞

Comments

10 responses to “On Moving to Lion: Spaces and Mission Commander”

  1. Stephen Usher

    There are some other major regressions as well, such as a major memory leak which causes the machine to grind to a wheel of death after a few days of constant use and just the general slowdown.

    It has a definite air of Vista about it.

    If you can stay on 10.6 until 10.8 comes out I think.

    Reply
  2. Michael Jennings

    I am finding that Lion takes a very long time to connect to known WiFi networks. Going from 10.7 to 10.7.1 was supposed to fix this, but it hasn’t.

    Reply
  3. Aram H?v?rneanu

    Why SL -> Lion upgrade? If you reformatted anyway, you could have installed Lion in the first place.

    I agree that Lion is not polished. There are significant API changes causing plan9port not to build anymore and dtrace is kind of broken sometimes.

    Reply
  4. Aram H?v?rneanu

    PS: There’s something wrong with your site|database encoding, it can’t handle my name.

    Reply
  5. David Spira

    When I first upgraded I had a hard time even finding where they hid Spaces.

    That being said, as annoying as some of these new UI changes are, I don’t think it’s fair to call Lion Apple’s Vista if only because it doesn’t have the memory problems.

    Lion is irritating.

    Vista was unusable.

    Reply
  6. Brad

    Lots of issues, and I agree with you about seeing what they’re trying to do, but…

    One really annoying thing is that there is no longer a “Save as…” in Preview (or many other applications).

    You can “Save a version”, but that’s the only save option. When you do that, you can revert via a Time Machine-like interface to any previous version of the file. OK, nice, I see what they’re trying to do…

    …*but*, if you want to keep both your old version and your new version, you have to manually duplicate the file in Finder or find some other hack-around.

    Sigh.

    Reply
  7. Brad

    … and I totally agree with David about Vista. Completely unusable.

    Reply
  8. Aram H?v?rneanu

    Oh, and I completely hate the auto-save state of applications when they are shut down.

    Reply
  9. Magnus

    Why not just bind hotkeys to each virtual desktop? I have used it like that for a long time and find it really quick to always know that for example Mail is in the desktop you get to with cmd-3 and so on.

    Reply
  10. Stephen Usher

    Actually, on the 2 year old, Core 2 Duo based Mac Mini at work Lion *IS* practically unusable.

    Not only is the machine glacially slow (even when first booted) but all you have to do is start up Powerpoint and try to do a single page and suddenly you get the psychedelic hamster wheel of death showing up. After a while the system will grind to a thrashing halt before random applications die.

    It looks like something major is leaking memory and the machine is going into swap hell. (And MacOS X’s VM subsystem has never been that great. See an ealier post by Alec about the swap file stupidity.)

    Reply

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