Apple effectively deprecates the Quit command
Lion is far more than just new user interface features. Apple have fundamentally rethought the human computer interaction at a much deeper level. There are radical changes to the nearly thirty year old document model and quite fundamental changes to the human interaction with the process model.
Applications without processes. Processes without applications. Did Lion just blow your mind?
These are very impressive, significant shifts.
If you haven’t read the Ars Technica in depth review of Lion, and you are interested in the geeky underpinnings of the changes, you owe it to yourself to read all 19 pages. John Siracusa has again written the best review out there of a new OS X release.
Lion multitouch and older intel Macs
I can confirm that Macs without the newer multi-touch trackpads (or an appropriate mouse) only have limited gesture support on Lion. I have a late 2006 Mac Book Pro with an early multitouch trackpad. It basically supports two finger touch but not three, so a lot of the Lion gestures are out.
I must say I’m still getting used to “natural”(!) scrolling. Great on an iPad, feels weird on a trackpad. Perhaps it’s just and adjustment period.
Disable spotlight indexing
Booting into OS X Lion for the first time after install means spotlight reindexing all volumes. Opening Mail also triggers a full email migration to a new mail database format. This made my MacBook Pro pretty unresponsive for a while. Activity Monitor showed very little CPU utilisation, and a reasonable amount of free memory. Disk activity was clearly the culprit.
Time to disable spotlight for a while.
sudo mdutil -a -i off
To turn spotlight back on
sudo mdutil -a -i on
(Source: osxdaily.com)
Even better than saving a copy of the installer app - make a real install disk, from thumb drive or USB hard drive, or if you want slow, optical drive. The good folks at Ars Technica are on the other end of the link.
I love the way Apple are prepared to pioneer leaving the past behind. I remember the hoo- ha about Apple dropping floppy drives and the derision from PC devotees. Committing to Digital Distribution only for an OS version is apple core.
