If I’m Lion, I’m Dyin’

What began as a complaint thread internally to my team became this diatribe. It started because I upgraded to OS X Lion and one of the first things I noticed was it broke my company’s VPN (Citrix Secure Gateway), and it snowballed from there. I’m a pretty reasonable Apple Fanboy, but this new OS hasn’t won me over yet.

After about 24 hours of Lion (besides that old “Access Gateway Doesn’t Work” thing), I’ve found the ‘reversed’ scrolling’s not that hard to get used to, the gloss changes for progress bars and buttons is pretty nice, but the Spaces -> Mission Control stuff is just plain awful. A real step back in my opinion in their decision to make it like the iOS style. I guess when they make more money selling iPads than macs that might cause a shift in paradigms for them.

I will *never* use their “Launchpad” app which takes all your application icons and lays them out in a grid ala IOS. I live and breathe with Spotlight to launch (actually I use Quicksilver) so it’s all keyboard. Making a grid of applications is more focus on mousing which will result in more RSS (not the cool feeds kind… The carpal tunnel kind)

*sigh*

If you have 5 “spaces” or whatever they’re called in the new Mission Control parlance, you can hit ctrl-1, ctrl-2, etc to get to space 1-4, but you can’t go to space 5 by hitting ctrl-5…. Unless you’re holding ctrl down from a previous change. I.e. Hit ctrl-1 but hold ctrl then hit ctrl-5 while still holding ctrl, and then it switches to space 5.This better be a bug, and not that “I’m holding it wrong” (ala the iPhone 4 antenna problems)

*double sigh*

Another bad thing about the new Mission Control thing is it doesn’t wrap around. You can use ctrl-left or ctrl-right (like in 10.5/10.6 Spaces) but unlike Spaces (and like the iphone/ipad/iOS) it no longer wraps around – if you’re on the “rightmost” space and hit ctrl-right it will not wrap around to the first space.

*triple sigh*

You can no longer arrange spaces vertically, it’s only one horizontal strip (which, again, does NOT wrap around) so ctrl-down and ctrl-up no longer are helpful. I used to arrange my spaces as a grid, so I could get from any space to any other space since the spaces wrapped, and I could move vertically.

*quadruple sigh*

Multi monitor support is JUNK now. Dragging between screens is harder. In all windows Exposé mode, it used to show all the windows and spaces and monitors, together, so you could drag a window from any space to any other space and any monitor in any space – I.e. I could drag from space 1, monitor 2 to space 2 monitor 1. Now you see all the spaces in one monitor, and the other monitor has all its own spaces… It breaks the arrangement between the monitors. Also, you can only drag a window to the “space group” – space 1 to space 2, then once in that space, you drag the window from one monitor to the other. Organization FAIL.

*One more sigh (thing)*

If you have an app (like their mail app or safari) that can go full screen mode, it takes up a whole space which looks kinda cool… but if you have two monitors, the secondary monitor is TOTALLY wasted. You cannot use the secondary monitor for anything when an app is in full screen mode. You just get the new fancy grey linen pattern.

Is this Apple’s Windows Vista?