Installing OSX Lion. The three minutes was before the restart. Over 30 minutes after.

On July 20, Apple finally released its long awaited update to Snow Leopard; codename Lion.

I was a little pensive upgrading to this operating system. Snow Leopard was a great update, but with it, I lost my ability to connect to a network printer. Still, for $30, I thought I would give it a try.

My install did not go as smoothly as I had hoped. I thought, given that I’m updating a day late, there would be less traffic to the Mac site.

That wasn’t my primary problem though. I had tried to click install a few times, and that didn’t work. Patiently, I tried over and over until I finally resumed downloading.

After about two and a half hours, a decent amount of time, my copy of Lion was downloaded. At least the App Store said, I had all 3.74 GB of it. Yet, somehow, it also spawned an error that my internet connection was not available. Upon clicking install again, it proceeded to download the ENTIRE thing a second time. That’s an extra 3.74 GB against my monthly Rogers quota.

Finally, after waiting about three hours the second time around, it finally proceeded to install. I was entertaining a guest at the time so after clicking install, I came back to my computer about three hours later to a login screen. I assume that means it installed without a problem.

Here are eight things I learned while prowling around Lion. I hope they help you with your experience too.

1. Versions
   I was looking forward to having Versions on this system. I wasn’t sure how this was going to be implemented, but I had high hopes for it being like the Subversion version control system for Mac with the same name. Unfortunately, I was wrong. I thought that the system would somehow save versions to time machine, but instead, according to The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), “What’s fascinating is that Auto Save and Versions keep all of the different versions of your document in one file.”
2. Scrolling direction
   We are all accustomed to pulling down scroll bars since the very first Windows. Now, with the advent of touch screen devices, we have to think of pushing text up rather than pulling scroll bars down. Thus, I am trying to recondition the way I think about scrolling which in turn should condition my habits. If you do not like it, uncheck “Scroll direction: natural” in the trackpad settings.
3. Swipe to go back
   If you are wondering why your three fingered swipe doesn’t take you back a page in an application such as your web browser, head to the trackpad set up screen. The first two options are ”Swipe between pages” and ”Swipe between full-screen apps”. By default, your three fingered swipe will move between full screen apps. Change it around to “Swipe between page” to get the effect you are used to.
4. Hideous skins
   The new skins for the calendar and address book are hideous. Thank goodness I use Android for my mobile computing needs and do not have to deal with either of the two.
5. Mail application
   The mail application looks a lot more polished that before and I especially like the threaded views. However, I am not sure how well it syncs with Gmail. For the past four months or so, I have turned to Sparrow as it is designed specifically to work with Gmail.
6. Full Screen Apps
   If you accidentally get curious and click on the arrow on the top right of your window, that takes you to a full screen app mode. Moving your cursor to the top of the screen will pull down the menu bar, along with a button to restore back to a windowed application. Note that such a button does not exist for Chrome. It took me a while to figure that out as Chrome just happened to be the first I clicked on.
7. Mission Control Focus
   I have come to be used to Expose. While Mission Control is not a bad idea, I can’t drag applications from the desktops that are not in focus. I used to drag windows between desktops simply by invoking Expose. Now moving windows around becomes more painful. Note that you can switch the focus desktop by using Option-Click on the thumbnails.
8. Launchpad is useless.
   There is no reason why I would start an application to display all the icons for all the apps and attempt to locate the one program I want, when I can simply activate the program from Spotlight. (Or in my case, Google Desktop.)

So was this worth my $30? I am not sure about that.

Without auto-versioning system wide, that became useless pretty fast. While I do type out some of my news stories in Pages and use Numbers sparingly, most of my development work is done on Eclipse. Being a Java program, it makes no benefit whatsoever from Versions.

I’m pretty disappointed with Lion and I hope I can find something in the OS while using it to justify the $30 I spent.

** soon after I hit publish, my three finger swipe just stopped working **