What tiny thing in Lion makes you smile or has caught you off guard?

http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/17759/what-tiny-thing-in-lion-makes-you-smile-or-has-caught-you-off-guard

by acangiano • 15 years ago

68 75 15 years ago

apple.stackexchange.com

sebbi2• 15 years ago

Everybody talking about little details of an otherwise not so significant update makes me smile (or has caught me off guard) ... you people are crazy and need to realise that you spend way too much time with your OS ...

president• 15 years ago

Sure it's not a major update but it is the little things that makes an OS great. After being a long time power Windows user, switching to Mac OS made me realize how the little things can really improve productivity and workflows.

sebbi2• 15 years ago

No they don't ... if you spent this much time with your OS you are doing it wrong, sorry.

jmreid3• 15 years ago

I'd argue that it is a major update when you consider the security features and a whole new paradigm for saving files. To me is seems like the beginning of a bright future.

jamesteow• 15 years ago

The differences between products within automotive, fashion, industrial, interactive, and applications design are often in the details.

I'm very glad that people pay attention to the details. It makes the extra hours of polish worth it. And why shouldn't it? The product you are buying SHOULD have that amount of care.

glassx2• 15 years ago

Ironically, with those small details I'll be able to spend even less time doing mundane tasks on my OS. :)

sheffield• 15 years ago

"How about ability to resize windows from all edges of the window. That alone is worth the 30 bucks."

That made me smile...

jmreid3• 15 years ago

Love that you can hold option while resizing to change the size from the opposite ends. Very handy.

jodrellblank2• 15 years ago

Or hold shift to keep the width/height ratio the same.

manuelflara• 15 years ago

Of all the "big features" Lion has, the one that I find a good reason to upgrade is Mission Control. Still, not being that big of a deal, I've been lazy about actually upgrading. Funnily enough, reading about some of the really awesome small details that people are talking about there really make me want to upgrade!

tehjones• 15 years ago

The quality of the badges on apps seems very low right now, it seems really grainy on mail.app (to be fair I havent seen a badge of anything else).

spicyj2• 15 years ago

Yep, the pixelation is something I've noticed all around. Hopefully it will be fixed in 10.7.1.

waterside81• 15 years ago

Thank you - I thought I was going nuts. I kept staring at it trying to remember what it looked like on SL, convinced that it had got worse. And the close/hide/zoom buttons in the top left are smaller too.

cj• 15 years ago

I actually regret upgrading at this point mainly because of Mission Control. 2d spaces and painfully slow switch-screen animations has hurt my productivity.

AlexandrB• 15 years ago

After seeing the Lion previews, I thought the 2d spaces would be a problem for me as well. However I was pleasantly surprised when I found that my keyboard shortcuts still worked (I use Cmd+# to switch to a space). Since this takes me directly to a space the animations is no worse than that in Snow Leopard.

bretthoerner• 15 years ago

The difference is that you could disable the animation in Snow Leopard,

    defaults write com.apple.dock workspaces-swoosh-animation-off -bool YES && killall Dock

If anyone knows how to do the same under Mission Control please, please do tell.

makecheck2• 15 years ago

Yes...I filed a bug report over the slow animation speeds. I have become quite used to switching spaces from the keyboard, and watching my 8-core machine take several arbitrary seconds to do so is always frustrating.

vmmenon• 15 years ago

I miss expose ...

doctoboggan• 15 years ago

Expose is gone in Lion? has it been replaced by something similar?

hskf• 15 years ago

Anyone else have a problem with the clicking on the trackpad when waking from sleep? Sometimes when opening my air, the mouse is unable to click on anything - I can only move the cursor and right click. Closing and re-opening the lid will solve the problem, but it is pretty damn frustrating

mark_l_watson• 15 years ago

You just need to press either shift key.

jodrellblank2• 15 years ago

As seen on ArsTechnica, "Hey! OpenBSD's PacketFilter is in Lion!" - http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=115170...

bdhe• 15 years ago

This is not a criticism, just a curious enquiry. How does Apple manage to get so much support and discussion that seems very organic and grassroots in nature about its product releases, but somehow Microsoft and Windows get the short end of the stick? It is in no sense a scientific observation, but I did not notice so much interest when Windows 7 was released, even on Hacker News.

sid03• 15 years ago

This site should be renamed Apple Fanboy News, that's why. I'm tired of these worthless submissions. There are lots of things I like about my OS, but I'm not insecure enough to need to justify any love I might have by telling everybody on Hacker News about it.

Maro• 15 years ago

It's actually a very good submission. I didn't know Leopard had all these neat features. Now I want to upgrade.

I also have a Windows box, and I wouldn't mind a similar SE about Win7 niceties, and of course Win7 having such niceties...

bkudria• 15 years ago

This is a fascinating goldmine of interesting little things for UI or UX people.

schlomie4• 15 years ago

The spell checker auto-detects the language you're writing in and switches to the correct dictionary for a sentence. How cool is that?

sid03• 15 years ago

Hah, looks like I touched a nerve here. -9 points and counting.

radley• 15 years ago

Windows 7 did get a lot of press but it followed Vista, an OS by my understanding that was hated by many. Thus the improvements were perceived as fixes rather than revolutionary.

Herring• 15 years ago

Apple has spent decades working on its reputation. Success today depends more on what you were doing 5, 10 years ago.

dstein• 15 years ago

I think it's safe to say at this point that most "techy" people have moved to Macbooks - by "most" I mean over 50%. And if you happen to browse tech sites there's a good chance a majority of them are using OSX now.

frou_dh4• 15 years ago

I'd bet such Mac-proliferation varies greatly by country.

sid03• 15 years ago

I think it's safe to say at this point that most "techy" people have moved to Macbooks - by "most" I mean over 50%.

Oh, Americans and their blinkered worldviews.

frou_dh4• 15 years ago

They're a design-oriented company so attract people interested in the details.

_b8r02• 15 years ago

It seems strange to me that you would associate design with the details.

Perhaps details of the aesthetics, but not the details of what's actually happening (i.e. the technical details).

Having said that, I set up an Apple Time Capsule today expecting it to be painful. The hardest thing was remembering my router password to turn the wireless off. I think that's probably a better reason why they get such press - that the user experience is more important than the features.

schlomie4• 15 years ago

I think if Windows shipped with the ability mount an ISO, open a tar file, ssh client, virtual desktops, usable notepad, "Open with" doesn't make you hunt for an exe, drag to resize command windows, dialog boxes you can clip error messages off of, ctrl-a consistently selects all of the text in a field, that might be a start to getting positive support.

2c..

pbhjpbhj• 15 years ago

But Ubuntu, say, doesn't get all the buzz that OSX releases do, does it? It has all those things.

xentronium• 15 years ago

> I think if Windows shipped with the ability mount an ISO, open a tar file, ssh client, virtual desktops, usable notepad, "Open with" doesn't make you hunt for an exe, drag to resize command windows, dialog boxes you can clip error messages off of, ctrl-a consistently selects all of the text in a field, that might be a start to getting positive support.

No, I bet if it could do all this things, it would get more lawsuits and BS. It's all about Steve Jobs famous distortion field.

Disclaimer: proud mac owner.

ericras• 15 years ago

What is the "usable notepad" that comes on OS X? Are you referring to TextEdit? I guess I've never learned to use it properly because it just saves code as .rtf and blows it all up.

As far as I see it Windows requires getting Notepad++ and Mac requires getting something like Text Wrangler.

chrischen• 15 years ago

Microsoft probably has more casual users who don't really care.

nomdeplume3• 15 years ago

Pros: generally "feels" faster than 10.6 - repairing permissions seems to stick whereas 10.6 would always have 10000 broken permissions. cons: - Removed ability to use resize icons by clicking and dragging slider bar. now you have to set in view options - stubborn settings like having windows reappear upon restart despite disabling feature. - you STILL have to get plugins like totalfinder to set up finder with tabs. default is like opening up a new browser window each time you want to go to a new link.

philfreo• 15 years ago

The slider in finder is still there, but you have to turn on the status bar to see it

nomdeplume3• 15 years ago

tnx for the tip. Turns out that opening finder was clipping off the bottom part where slider is. The only way I found out was by clicking and dragging the window downward an inch or two. Definitely needed that.

MostAwesomeDude• 15 years ago

That method of entering accents seems really backwards to me. Why not a Compose key?

julian37• 15 years ago

Agreed. I don't have Lion installed yet, but in SL I can enter "ä" by typing option-U, then A. The article makes it sound like the new behavior can be disabled so I'm hoping that means the current behavior, which I'm very happy with, still works!

spicyj2• 15 years ago

It does.

ü < crude attempt at a smiley face ;)

gchpaco• 15 years ago

It has a compose key already in Option; this is more discoverable. (or can you figure out how to write ē easily on a US keyboard?)

Limes102• 15 years ago

Actually didn't realise how many things I like in Lion...

"When you do things right, no one will notice you've done anything at all"

necubi• 15 years ago

My favorite new feature is the revamped FileVault. The old version of FV was a huge mess: it only encrypted your home directory, it didn't play nice with TimeMachine (since it saw your home directory as one giant encrypted file) and was generally a nuisance.

Lion's FileVault is full-disk encryption and operates at the file-system level. This means that every program sees your encrypted file system as just ordinary files, while HFS+ is transparently encrypting and decrypting on every read and write from the hardware. This makes full disk encryption so simple and problem-free that I recommend everybody turn it on, immediately.

Ars has more information on how this all works (http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7.a...).

kalvin• 15 years ago

Agreed, this is my favorite too. And, after you encrypt your primary drive, you can either leave your Time Machine drive alone (which seems silly, but it's an option now, whereas before using FileVault created an encrypted disk image, which meant Time Machine could no longer backup changes-only, defeating the purpose of TM), or you can go into TM settings and encrypt your TM drive too.

You can also encrypt secondary disks on the command line. It all runs silently in the background until encryption is done.

There is a 20-30% disk performance hit (that I haven't noticed, on an SSD): http://www.anandtech.com/show/4485/back-to-the-mac-os-x-107-...

mmuro• 15 years ago

The Finder's "Arrange by Kind" has been updated to actually group the different files. Folders, Documents, Developer, Images, etc. I really like this.

protomyth• 15 years ago

Do people like or hate that the order of labels has changed when sorting by label? (labeled items now appear first, but in a reverse alpha order)

tree_of_item• 15 years ago

You can have different backgrounds on different Spaces. It's great to be able to organize a little mental model of your workspace by using differently colored backgrounds. I find I'm using the swipe gesture to change spaces frequently, and it can get a bit disorienting; every space looks almost the same except for a slightly different arrangement of rectangles.

makecheck2• 15 years ago

That's true; although the desktop background pane in System Preferences can be quite buggy, to the point where it's far from obvious that it would even be possible to make the backgrounds different.

For instance, it will only appear by default on the displays you have on the desktop you're using, and it shows the background of that desktop in its mini-rendition even if you try to switch desktops. It can also sometimes show the wrong background in the preferences pane even after you've changed it. So although it does work, it hardly gives the user confidence.

The most reliable method seems to be to use the Finder's "Change Desktop Background..." contextual menu from the desired desktop, to force System Preferences to open in the right state.

nomdeplume3• 15 years ago

If upsidedown smiles count, I would have to say that Launchpad makes me smile with its duplicate entrys and no intuitive method of organization/removal of entrys.

micampe• 15 years ago

My absolutely favorite feature is "Show related messages" in Mail conversations. 10 years after Gmail did it right, I can start using a desktop client again.

nostromo• 15 years ago

I love the "sign without printing" feature in preview. I've already used it to sign some legal docs. The one problem is my lawyer then asked for originals... d'oh!

mmariani• 15 years ago

I really like Mission Control, specially two of it's features. First, creating spaces on the fly. Second, dragging an app icon and dropping in another space moves all of it's windows to that space. It's like Apple read my mind! Sweet.

Another thing is UI update as a whole. Aqua has been outdated for quite a while. Now all objects look and feel more real. Also I'm enjoying the new windows' subtle lighting and texture, they look like anodized aluminum.

But the top feature on my list are the new APIs, of course.

What tiny thing in Lion makes you smile or has caught you off guard?

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