They do say that you should never install version 1 of any software - but I bit the bullet and installed MacOSX 10.7 Lion on the day it was released. As you will see, the transition has not been exactly smooth, but overall, I would say, well worth the £20.99 it cost.
1. The Future.
Lion is available as a download from the Mac App Store. If you have no idea what that is, or if you are vaguely looking at your iPhone and wondering how to install a computer operating system from there, the chances are you have not got one of the last few versions of Snow Leopard. The App Store was introduced in January with the Mac OSX 10.6.6 release. If you are running Snow Leopard already (Mac OSX 10.6) then run Software Update from the menu to bring your machine up to date.
If you are running MacOSX 10.5 or earlier, you will have to upgrade to Snow Leopard before upgrading to Lion. There may be another upgrade path later, but at the moment Apple shows no signs of bending.
Hardware-wise, you will need an Intel Core-2-Duo or later and an absolute minimum of 15Gb of free hard disk space.
Where Apple have bent slightly, is in the requirement for a fast broadband connection. The file is a 4Gb download – which on a slow broadband connection could take hours or even days. So, the good folk at Apple have graciously said that you can take your computer into any Apple Store and download it using their WiFi! A USB stick has been released at a significantly higher price (£69) for those who don’t have broadband access – or who need to install across multiple machines.
Whilst this may cause problems for some in the short term, it is clearly the future – and will save millions of tons of carbon in the manufacture of little plastic discs and transporting them around the world, so it is to be welcomed.
2. Installation
a. I clicked on the <Install App> button, typed my Adminstrator Name and Password to give the installer access to my computer, typed my Apple ID password to authorise payment from my credit card (£20.99 Windows Users! Cheapest Home User Windows 7 Upgrade Licence I can find is over £80 from Amazon) and the download started. Being nosy, I clicked on the <Purchased> tab to see how long it would take. In my case (20Mb download speed) about 23 minutes.
Various buttons to confirm that I wanted to quit all my applications – I probably agreed to a licence in there somewhere too. My machine re-started and the installation started. It predicted 33 minutes, so I went downstairs for a cup of coffee. Came back upstairs to a big yellow exclamation mark – INSTALLATION FAILED – could not create a Recovery Partition on this volume.
Basically, Lion nicks about 650Mb of your hard drive to create an (invisible) disk with the wherewithal to repair your disk and system in the case of major failure.
But on my machine, it couldn’t be created.
I couldn’t fathom why – my disk is in good condition – factory fitted by Apple. I had almost 100Gb of free space. I tried unplugging peripherals, to no avail. So, to Google.
Others had had the same problem (this was within an hour of the software being released!) – and it seemed to be associated with certain “non-standard” Boot Camp partitions. I have Boot Camp to run Windows programmes at work. It was installed by our IT department. I never touch it, but as they know nothing about Macs, I was surprised to learn that it might be ‘non-standard.’ I rarely use Boot Camp, preferring to access Windows via VMWare Fusion. This seems to have rendered my BC partition non-standard. There were lots of stories of Apple Tech support telling users to delete Windows, install Lion, then re-install Windows. I took the much less drastic route of booting into Windows using Boot Camp, checking my work email, then re-booting in Snow Leopard. This clearly wrote some standard Apple code onto the BC partition because at the third attempt, Lion installed without a hitch.
b. On my wife’s iMac, the installation appeared to be seamless – until I tried to install some new software.
I always run Macs with the main account as a ‘normal’ account without administrator privileges. I have a single username and password which I use to administer all the computers for which I am responsible.
Deborah’s iMac upgraded perfectly and logged into her account without a hitch, but of course, when I came to install software, I needed an Administrator password. And it simply refused to recognise my Administrator account. The User folder was still there – but the account didn’t exist. Apparantly, this is not uncommon – and the fix was relatively straightforward, but it did involve changing the Root password, logging in as Root to create a new account with exactly the same name and user folder. Not serious, as it turned out, but rather alarming!
This bug has – apparently – been fixed in the 10.7.1 update released today.
3. First Impressions
Aaagh – I use an Apple Mighty Mouse with a scroll ball. The scroll ball works backwards. HELP. The first thing I did was to turn this new “feature” off.
But then I read a review in MacWorld, which explained the thinking and I have decided to turn it back on for a few days to see whether I can get used to it. Let me explain.
In previous systems, to scroll a document, you clicked on a scroll bar and dragged it down. This pulled the document up – a bit like a window blind.
Lion changes the metaphor because it is much more designed to be used with a trackpad than with a mouse. As with an iPad, iPhone or iPod touch, you are interacting with the document itself. So to move it up, you push it up. On a trackpad – or Apple’s shiny £59 Magic Trackpad (covet, covet) – scrolling up with two fingers moves a document up, down moves the document down – and where necessary left and right do the same.
They have simply taken this metaphor and extended it (rather less successfully, I think) to the mouse scrollball. Let’s see whether we can get used to it.
4. Wow – it’s quick!
Apple have changed the whole architecture of the operating system. It will now only run on 64-bit Intel Chips. If you have a PowerPC or early Intel Mac, Lion is not for you. This also means that older applications – designed for PowerPC, but running in “Rosetta” will no longer work. Probably the best known such casualty is Microsoft Office 2004. The 2008 and 2011 versions both work fine, though.
The huge advantage of this change is that your entire computer will feel as though it has had an injection of adrenalin! For me, this is most notable in Safari. The new Safari 5.1 is lightning fast – which is highlighted by a new effect when opening a new window – it sort of wooshes out of the screen at you.
5. Mail Woes
Getting Mail working was something of a challenge. When you first launch Mail, you will get a message to say that your Mailboxes need to be upgraded and that this will take some time.
For me, that is as far as it got. Mail immediately crashed.
I should say now, that the new Mail is a vast improvement on the old version – and well worth the hassle of getting it working – but it did take me 7 hours to be able to send an email!
If Mail works for you, I should skip the next bit as it gets a bit geeky.
Your User Library is now invisible by default – but that is where MacOS stores various vital components – including your Mailboxes. It turned out that the offending file was <envelope.index> which is stored in your <Mail> Folder. (Apparantly some people have more than one of these files) All that is required it to delete this/ these files.
You have to find them first, of course. The internet is awash with instructions on how to make this invisible system folder visible – but I happen to think it is invisible for good reasons. It isn’t something you want to mess with unless you know what you’re doing.
The solution is to use the Finder’s <Go to Folder> found in the <Go> menu. Type /users/AccountName/Library/Mail replacing AccountName with your username and you will instantly be whisked away to the invisible folder where you can delete away to your heart’s content wreaking havoc with your operating system!
Seriously, be careful – you may be asked for a password before you are allowed to delete anything. Make sure you know what you are doing before entering it.
But deleting <envelope.index> worked for me. It still took another two hours to upgrade my email database, but I did have almost a thousand messages in my inbox.
6. Mail
The new Mail is a thing of beauty, though, adding a three column view, a wonderful ‘view by conversation’ and a genuinely useful flagging system. The search system is much improved too – but then, it could hardly have got worse.
7. On the Dock
By default (although of course you can change this), you will find four new icons:
Launchpad
This looks very much like the homescreen on an iPad – an application launcher. Whilst it is very pretty, I think that after the novelty has worn off, it will probably be consigned to the scrapheap for me. I have three screens of applications and it simply takes too long to scroll through three screens of pretty icons. I use Quicksilver. Pressing <ctrl> and <spacebar> followed by the first couple of letters of the application’s name is simply faster and more convenient than going down to the trackpad to invoke Launchpad.
Mission Control
On the other hand, I am rapidly learning to love Mission Control. It is a sort of cross between Spaces and Exposé. Flick 3 fingers upwards on the trackpad – or click the Mission Control icon and you are taken to a kind of “pasteboard” with your desktop in the middle. On and around it are images of all the windows you have open at the moment. Neat, but Exposé used to do that. Ah, but along the top are images of all the Spaces you have open – so, in the office, for example, you could have a work Space open and a play Space, flicking between the two whenever the boss appeared. Or more usefully, if you are working, as I often do, on two projects at once, have a Space for each with the various applications and windows opened and arranged as you like them.
Mission Control has another card up its sleeve – but that leads us onto another new feature which I’m getting to love
Full Screen Apps
I get easily distracted. In Lion (at least in any applications which are written to take advantage of Lion’s new features – and Word 2008 certainly isn’t) just click the expand button on the top right hand corner and the app will take over the whole of your screen, thus hiding away that oh-so-tempting Google Reader window in Safari!
And when you move into Full Screen like this – Lion automatically creates a new Space and puts it in to Mission Control.
App Store
If you’ve got Lion, you’ll already be familiar with the Mac App Store – as you will if you have an iPhone or iPad. In theory, it will keep your applications up to date for you – and should even be smart enough to work out which apps you already have installed. Unfortunately because of the way Apple wrote it, it can only update apps which you have bought/ downloaded through the store. And several of the big players – Microsoft and Adobe to name two – aren’t playing. But some of the prices make it a compelling place to shop – Aperture for £54.99 compared with a boxed price of £170, for example.
Facetime
Finally on the new Dock, is a video camera icon for Facetime. This isn’t technically new – if you have an iPhone or iPad 2 you already have Facetime – Apple’s fantastic video calling software, but now you have it built in to your computer too. It is beautifully integrated into Address Book too. The only trouble is that like iChat before it, other manufacturers have not adopted the technology, so at the moment few people are using it. It hasn’t replaced Skype on my Dock yet.
8. The Ugly
OK, I’ve got to have a rant. Someone in the Apple Design department is for the chop. Address Book and iCal have been given a makeover – and they have been designed to look like that awful faux leather imitation Filofax your aunt gave you in 1987. iCal is particularly hideous. It even has the imitation torn edges of the pages you have torn off your calendar. And I haven’t actually found any new functionality in it yet either.
Address book does have a few tricks up its ugly, faux leather pocket book sleeve. You can now add Twitter, Facebook and other contact details, clicking on which will take you to the relevant pages.
9. Multitouch gestures
If you have an iPad or iPhone you’ll be used to pinching, squeezing, rotating, and flicking with a varied number of fingers. Now all of that has come to MacOS. Of course, if you have an iMac with a Mighty Mouse or earlier, this is irrelevant. But if you have a Magic Mouse, with its touch sensitive surface – or if you are lucky enough to have a Magic Trackpad – or of course, if you have a laptop with built in trackpad, this will make life much easier. The three fingered flick upwards to launch Mission Control is already part of my everyday surfing.
Using a mouse now seems very primitive and I fear I’ll be buying a Magic Trackpad before too long.
10. Tweaks
I’ve found a few nice little features so far.
For example, there is now a system-wide dictionary. Much as you can in Kindle or iBooks publications – you can double-click on a word to bring up a definition.
In applications which are written to take advantage of it, you now have a similar function to the one on an iPad or iPhone keyboard. To type a character with an accent, simply press and hold down the relevant key to bring up a menu of all the possible accented versions of the letter.
There is now a system-wide autocorrect feature. As in iOS, the advice is to trust it. Keep typing and it will correct your typos – most of the time.
Auto Resume – if you quit a programme in the middle of a task, the next time you launch the programme, it will open exactly where you left it, with the same windows open etc.
Time Machine Snapshots – My external hard drive is on its last legs so I haven’t plugged it in to my laptop for days. Time Machine now takes snapshots of your hard drive – and stores them on the hard drive itself until you are next able to connect to your main Time Machine drive. Of course, this won’t save me if my internal hard drive fails (I use MobileMe, Dropbox, SugarSync and Mozy for that!), but at least if I accidentally delete a file, I should be able to recover it.
Versions and Autosave. In programmes which support it, OSX now has an autosave feature, which produces versions – so, much like a Time Machine backup, you can flick back through the various versions of a file to find the version you are looking for. I must confess that I haven’t actually found a programme which supports this feature yet – or if it does, I don’t know where to find it. But it sounds useful.
Merging folders. When you attempt to copy two folders with the same name into the same place, Lion offers to merge them.
Group as folder. Select a few items and a <Group as folder> contextual menu item offers to create a new folder out of those items.
11. Anything which doesn’t work yet?
As far as I can find, the major problems are with programmes which are so old they are never going to work. Office 2004 and any Adobe programmes older than Creative Suite 3 spring to mind. If you rely on these, either don’t upgrade to Lion or bite the bullet and upgrade your software.
Two programmes which I use constantly are Evernote and Spanning Sync. Evernote have admitted that the facility to clip a webpage into Evernote is broken at the moment. I’m sure it will be fixed soon. In the meantime, Safari now has a wizzy new Reading List which has similar functionality – the ability to store a webpage to read later.
Spanning Sync have not yet admitted that there is a problem – but I have noticed number of pieces of information have gone missing since I upgraded. This is potentially serious – I ‘lost’ my wife’s mobile phone number. The first sync took many hours and several attempts, and generated lots of error messages. And the green ‘sync in progress’ light is stuck on permanently, although it does report that it is now syncing successfully. Most of you will never have heard of Spanning Sync. If you need to sync iCal or Address Book with Google, you will probably do so directly. For various reasons I can’t take that route, but it is a pretty arcane piece of software.
12. Anything I haven’t found yet?
Lots – Airdrop looks like a fantastic, configuration free way to share files – but it requires a pretty new Mac to work – in the case of Macbook Pro, which I use, late 2008, whereas mine is early 2008.
Apparently Spotlight searching is vastly improved.
New fonts
Much improved – and more powerful TextEdit.
As above – Versions & Autosave
Interact with iTunes artwork – or iPhotos if you use them as a screensaver.
Resize a window from any edge – wow, I’ve just tried that and it works. No more scrabbling around for the bottom right hand corner.
Conclusion
Lion only costs £20.99 – and that entitles you to – legally – install it on up to five machines registered to the same Apple account. Assuming your broadband connection is fast enough – and you have unlimited downloads, the only reason not to upgrade to Lion would be if you have a particular piece of software which needs the “Rosetta” Power-PC emulation to run. But such software is way beyond its sell-by date now, so sooner or later you are going to have to bite the bullet and upgrade. Lion might just be the reason to do so.
Neither am I a teenaged girl fan of Ariana Grande. But I rejoice to belong to a city which embraces and celebrates all of these communities. An attack on any one of them is an attack on us all. But we will not allow the voices of hate to drown out our cries of unity. The City of Manchester stands United.
