
What we know about Mac OS X Lion - shawndumas
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/02/what-we-know-about-mac-os-x-lion-so-far.ars
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eggbrain
>scrolling now works as it does on iOS devices--drag up on the trackpad to
scroll down, drag down to scroll up--complete with "rubber-band" effects at
the end of scrollable areas.

This doesn't make sense to me from a design sense. With an iPhone or iPad,
your finger was touching the screen, so it emulated real "dragging" content
down to where you could see it. With a computer however, there's a disconnect
between the screen and your fingers, which makes it not as intuitive. Combine
this with a few years of two finger scrolling being the exact opposite, and I
feel like this will kind of be a pain to get used to.

~~~
seabee
It's worse than that. One finger dragged up moves the cursor up, two fingers
dragged up scrolls the window... down? Is it really sensible to be internally
inconsistent?

It also runs counter to scroll wheels on mice, which has a physical reason for
the direction too.

~~~
sans-serif
It doesn't make sense only because you put it in terms of some completely
abstract and made-up notion of "scrolling the window". Put another way:

One finger drags the cursor up and down

Two finger drags the underlying page up and down

Four finger drags the underlying space left, right, up or down

Perfectly consistent, no? I won't argue that forcing people to relearn
scrolling is an uphill battle. But I'm a Dvorak typist.

~~~
seabee
It's one way to look at it. I'm used to the behavior of the scroll wheel, and
also the scroll keys - moving the cursor down will necessarily move the
underlying page up to keep it visible, so that equates to 'scrolling down' in
my mind. This was completely logical until smartphones came along. Obviously
Apple are finding a lot of their users believe (or soon will believe)
otherwise.

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1001100
Versions is nice. After you first save the file every subsequent manual save
creates a version. There are consequently not only the automatic hourly
versions.

The UI is a bit clunky, though. OS X switches to a fullscreen Time Machine
view which felt way too jarring to me.

The locking behavior is also very well thought out. Additionally to
automatically locking documents after two weeks, Lion also (better) exposes
this functionality in the UI. All this helps to make it much less likely that
you will ever accidentally overwrite an old document you used as a template.
(When you start editing a locked document a dialog pops up telling you that
the document is locked and the default option is not unlock but duplicate
which is great.)

~~~
niels_olson
How is this going to interact with git and versions (the svn client)? What
about my mediawiki install that versions every article already? How deep does
this new Versions go?

~~~
1001100
The developer has to use NSDocument and flip a switch in order to turn
Versions on. It’s not on by default.

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xbryanx
What we know about Mac OS X Lion: That it will almost certainly break all the
tools you need to run a local web development environment and be a pain to
upgrade, but after a few months of weird hacks will go back to being a
fabulous working environment for programmers.

~~~
tofumatt
Really? Most of the standard web dev stuff (Ruby, PHP, Apache, etc.) comes out
of the box and works quite well, and if you need either specialized versions
of things (rvm, virtualenv, custom Apache, etc.) or stuff that doesn't come
with OS X (lighttpd, node.js, etc.) wouldn't it be installed in /usr/local?

I don't think this will break many web dev tools. Unless you mean stuff like
Sequel Pro or TextMate; even then, I can't imagine most apps won't make the
transition smoothly.

~~~
msbarnett
It really depends. Is Xcode 3 supported in Lion?

With the Xcode 4 unix tools installed I had _massive_ build problems with
homebrew. Not being able to build mysql, node.js, thinking-sphinx, redis,
mongo et al would constitute a pretty broken web dev environment, so if Lion
requires the newer version, which most tools don't yet build cleanly under,
that's a pretty big problem.

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ch0wn
Has there been an announcement regarding ATA TRIM support? It's about time.

~~~
adsr
No announcements, but according to this screen shot it looks like it's there.
[http://www.macstories.net/news/os-x-lion-adds-trim-
support-f...](http://www.macstories.net/news/os-x-lion-adds-trim-support-for-
ssds/)

~~~
wmf
Displaying the fact that an SSD supports TRIM does not prove that HFS+ uses
TRIM, but it's a good sign.

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moe
Oh, they rewrote finder again.

About time, considering the _trainwreck_ that is the Snow Leopard version.

Please, dear god, make that apple finally created something that lets me
browse my files as fast again as it was on my Amiga 500 in 1988. Clocked at
7.09 MHz. On floppy disks. I'm sure my 2 GHz machine can do this. It must be
possible.

~~~
ugh
Well, it looks different. I very much doubt that they changed much of the
internals – the Finder just was completely rewritten in Cocoa for Snow
Leopard.

When is the Finder slow for you? I never had problems with a slow Finder.

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pkamb
For someone who's tried it, how broken is the new Expose? Grid view in Snow
Leopard was bad enough...

~~~
1001100
The grid gone, at least for now. Exposé (now a part of Mission Control)
returns more or less to its old behavior. Windows are resized proportionally
and no more arranged in a grid. Quicklook continues to work and Exposé now
stacks the windows of one application together. It is no longer possible to
show minimized windows in Exposé. The dock is still displayed but clicking on
an icon no longer displays the windows of that app in Exposé, OS X will just
switch immediately to that app (the normal dock behavior).

The Dashboard, all spaces and all fullscreen apps are displayed along the top
of the Exposé view. It’s now possible to change the background image for each
space individually but no longer possible to arrange Spaces in a grid (there
is always a row of spaces). Clicking on a space in Exposé displays all its
windows in Exposé mode. The bird’s-eye view of only the spaces is gone but you
can drag windows in Exposé from one space to another. The arrow key Spaces
shortcuts also allow you to switch to the Dashboard or fullscreen apps.

~~~
pkamb
So is there a way to invoke a completely 10.5-esue Expose? Proportional
windows but NO windows/app grouping?

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sashthebash
Could they please _not_ make everything gray scale like the new iTunes?!

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pmjordan
Considering they're rolling it out via the app store, does this mean the
current preview doesn't actually contain a new kernel, just user space
enhancements?

~~~
danudey
They're rolling out the installer via the App Store. The Snow Leopard
installer was able to run without having to boot off the install media, so
presumably Lion's beta installer is doing the same thing.

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zv
I wonder if Apple will make iOS applications compatible with Mac. That would
bring more applications to Mac

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tjmaxal
there are things we know we know, and there are things we know we don't know
then there are things we don't know we don't know ...

