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Mac os X Lion first impressions Well I bit the bullet the other day and went out and brought the usb install disk for Mac os X lion. It's nice to be able to take this old fashioned approach, I have an adsl modem that has been a bit weird of late so the possibility of doing an on line based upgrade and it failing in the middle was a bit much to contemplate hence the USB. Things I Like The new square look and feel of the interface is refreshing - even if it's just because a change is as good as a holiday. Inbuilt rescue disk Mac os X builds a small rescue partition on your machine (start the machine while holding down the option key to see this - it may also be a good idea to boot into this to check it out) I think this is a great idea for tech support reasons. As long as the HD has not died you now no longer have to hunt around for a start up disk. Nice. The new mail is good I love the ability to import manage and use yahoo and gmail accounts into mail. For the first time ever I have all my mail backed up on my machine, not just sitting in the cloud. It is a bit strange in that you configure this thru the mail contacts and calenders function of the system preferences tab. But still a definite improvement. Mission Control - spaces I have friends that have used spaces a lot more efficiently than I have and I always wondered why I couldn't get comfortable with this technology. Mission Control seems to softly take my hand and guide me in a more graceful manner than spaces did. I think that the thing that put me off spaces was that sort of flicking back from one screen to another very quickly literary makes me feel queasy. The visual transition was to brutal for my delicate sensiteve brain! But now the way full screen apps and Mission Control are integrated I can see I will sort of fall into using the spaces paradigm in a more natural way. In short I like it It's visually more genteel, but I still have a bit to learn with regard how I might integrate this into my daily work flow. Terminal The full screen thing in Terminal is nice still exploring various bits and bobs. Performance I'm using an older Mac Book Pro running at 2.4 gig it's at the bottom of the heap as far as recommended config for lion is concerned. Initially it was sluggish for about 1 or 2 days right clicking and opening of new tabs in various browsers for some reason was killing the whole experience for me. I think what must have been happening was some sort of indexing or re indexing of spotlight (although the 20 - 30 thousand emails down loaded from my gmail and yahoo accounts probably had a lot to do with this). Things have now settled down and the machine is nearly as quick as snow leopard was. I think mac os X Lion had a lot more in store for us and icloud will be very interesting. Also nice is that now it's free to download xcode 4 if you have the free apple developer account. Things I don't like Ical and address book interfaces. Seems someone forgot that we are mac users This link http://macnix.blogspot.com/2011/07/change-mac-os-x-107-lion-ical-and.html Fixed the ugly ipad interface and brought back the subtlety of the osX environment. As for photo booth in full screen mode it reminded me of a bad hypercard stack on steroids during an acid trip. Launch pad It may work well on ipad but I can't much see it's use on the mac - except perhaps for new users or kids as a way to help them get use to the os. To Sum up Mac os X lion shows some promise. I don't like the ipad non standard apple interface that has been used in some of the apps (and hope I don' find any more!). I am concerned that this may be a continuing trend - but for now I can deal with it. A number of people have discussed Rossetta and it's absence and I do have a few old files running on snow leopard that I will have to look at translating. It's a frustrating omission. I feel that in a way this is just the beginning for lion I think it needs more refinement and the iColud thing will be interesting to see how it all integrates. I have a feeling we only have half of the picture at this point. I look forward to what is to come. 
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