Installed the Lion upgrade on my iMac this morning, though not without difficulty ... the download crashed the App Store application! My initial thoughts are mixed. Safari seems much improved, and the left/right swipe action there is brilliant. I'm already used to the "reversed" scrolling, but I re-enabled the always-visible scroll bar ... it makes no sense at all to have that disappear on a desktop device. Launchpad is useless for anyone with more than a handful of apps, and since I don't use Spaces I don't really like the new look of Mission Control. Mail seems more solid, though I went back to the classic UI there. There's a lot of serious ugliness in the UI, especially for a design-conscious company like Apple. The Finder and Mail went way too far towards the monochrome look ... the font choices, spacing, and graphic layout all suck. On the other hand, Apple went too far in the other direction in the Address Book and iCal, sacrificing usability and
Exactly ... and crappy font choices, too. Maybe there's a way to hack a different font into those programs ...
ReplyDeleteThanks for the TotalFinder suggestion ... off to look for it now.
ReplyDeleteAnd yeah, "grossly inconsistent" is definitely the phrase for the Lion apps. I really love Mail -- especially the search feature -- but the Finder is so ugly as to be offensive, and both iCal and Address Book are almost hopeless. Somebody really did let loose of the reins at Apple this time, at least when it comes to UI. I'm going to have to stick with Google for contact and calendar purposes, I think.
I've been playing with Path Finder a bit this morning ... pretty cool, but perhaps overkill.
ReplyDeleteI'm OK with the finder, and I'm really liking the Mission Control gestures much more than Expose. And the fullscreen apps work so well on a Macbook Air.
ReplyDeleteBut iCal and the Address Book seem to me like some kind of weird inside joke. One I'm not in on. Pointless decoration.
Have you guys seen
ReplyDeletewww.raskinformac.com ?
Pretty much useless for me, but if I worked with graphics, I think I'd be all over that.
ReplyDeleteRaskin looks interesting, but probably less useful for someone like me who works mostly with words rather than pictures. And I think it would require a massive reworking of my aging brain synapses.
ReplyDeleteI'm really liking Path Finder so far, though ... I think I may stick with that one.
Eric Hancock -- Totally agreed on the Weird Inside Joke of iCal and Address Book. And it's not even a very attractive joke ... :/
They make sense in Mission Control. More recognizable. That doesn't justify the boneheadedness of Address Book, though.
ReplyDeleteWE did the beta for Raskinformac and still get the pesky spam mails for new versions. It looks great at first look, but it pretty quickly devolves into a royal mess. Also runs like cold molasses on lower end hardware.
ReplyDeleteMark, this is going to sound really crazy, but have you considered going old school, using the terminal, grep, locate, find, vim, etc?
ReplyDeleteKinky ... but I kind of like it. Maybe I should try it for a day, just to see what happens, and to see how many of those commands I still remember ...
ReplyDelete