David Hurst – expert PHP/MySQL developer

Let me start by saying that I’ve just wiped my MacBook Air and I am now back in the comfortable surroundings of Snow Leopard. That’s the quick review.

I’m definitely what you would call a “power user”. As a professional web developer I demand much from my computer. It has to work well and not waste my time having to be fixed on a regular basis. This is the reason I left my PC and Windows well behind and moved to Mac in the first place. And, with each iteration of Mac OS X, the Mac has gotten a little better. Until recently, when Apple made the bemusing decision to bring the linear environment of the mobile OS to the Mac. This is not a step forward.

The App Store
It all started with the App Store – actually a great idea. I love the way I can log into App Store on my iMac and download all the applications I bought on my MacBook Air. It’s a great way to buy software, and it has resulted in a lot of software becoming much cheaper. The developers can afford to reduce prices because the App Store massively increases their market reach. What’s not to like?

Then, some bright spark at Apple decided that OS X Lion would be released as a download through the App Store, with no physical media edition available. This is a stupid idea. Apart from the obvious fact that a full OS could never be considered to be an “app”, in order to restore your machine, you will now have to restore a previous version of OS X first. On my MacBook Air (2010 edition) that means restoring Snow Leopard 10.6.4, and this doesn’t have the App Store. Therefore I then have to download the 10.6.8 upgrade which is best part of 1Gb in order to get the App Store. Once this has downloaded and installed, I would then have to re-download OS X Lion (several Gb) and install that. This is appalling. I’m glad I’m not a sysadmin supporting a network of Macs…

OS X Lion Visual Improvements
Once I had installed Lion, I was pleasantly surprised with the new visuals. It’s not a massive change – the login screen looks nicer and buttons are squarer. Overall, the appearance is better.

Launchpad
Launchpad brings iOS style app browsing to your Mac. Mastering the weird three finger plus thumb grasping gesture to open Launchpad can take a while. It doesn’t feel intuitive to me. But once in, it looks just like the screens on my iPad. I dove right in and started organising all my apps into neat little folders (a process that seems to take forever) and then never used it again. Why would I? I have all my most commonly used apps in my dock, I can rapidly hit Command+Shift+A in Finder to bring up the Applications folder, and I can search in Spotlight for an app – all of which can be done in significantly less time than it takes to open Launchpad and select an App.

Utterly pointless. It’s just eye candy. A home user or recent Windows migrator might be dazzled into thinking this is something “new” and “brilliant”, but for a professional user it has no point whatsoever.

Mission Control & Spaces
One of the best features of Linux is the way you can have multiple virtual desktops and switch between them. When Apple introduced this to OS X, I was over the moon. I have four virtual desktops arranged in a grid and I use Control+Arrow Keys to navigate between them. It makes my work easier, and makes a laptop with a lower screen resolution a viable main development machine. It allowed me to buy a 13″ MacBook Air to replace my enormous, more expensive and less mobile MacBook Pro 17″. For me Spaces is one of the key selling points of OS X. Trying to use Windows 7 without virtual desktops after Mac with Spaces is truly horrible.

So, why have Apple wrecked this functionality? In OS X Lion, you can no longer organise your Spaces in a grid – you have to have them all in a line. This is a real step backwards. What’s worse though, is that OS X Lion looks at how you use your spaces and then re-orders them on a whim. One minute your terminal windows are in the space next to your browser, then all of a sudden they’re two spaces away! Who’s in control here? It’s my computer and I know damn well how I work most efficiently. I don’t need an OS to make these decisions for me.

Another great feature of OS X is Expose and this used to combine really well with spaces, allowing you to rapidly move windows from one space to another. This functionality has also been removed.

Autosave & Versions
This seems like a neat feature, but it’s just confusing. I use Preview a lot for quickly cropping images, and saving a copy. Now I’m just confused – there’s no “Save As” option on the menu and it now seems to save the file the minute I change it.

The Autosave has been useful though, as when stuff inevitably crashes (which happens a lot in Lion), you don’t lose too much work. On reflection though, I’d rather have an OS that doesn’t crash and continue pressing Command+S on a regular basis as habit has taught me.

Mail
Mail now moves messages into conversations. This is annoying. If you have multiple new messages in a conversation, opening the conversation and scrolling through them immediately marks them as Read. Losing messages becomes much easier, since they end up somewhere in a conversation where you don’t expect them to be. Of course, in theory conversation threads are a great idea, but in the real world people don’t change the subject lines of emails when the subject changes. As a human being, I can determine a change of subject and organise my emails accordingly – the computer cannot.

Mail also has developed the annoying habit of crashing. A lot. Up to 10 times per day for me – always when I’m in the middle of typing a message. Autosave does mean that you don’t lose much, but I’d rather that it didn’t crash at all.

Auto Correct
The little auto correct spelling widget that pops up everywhere on iPad and iPhone to help counteract typos from the touch keyboard, has now made it on to the Mac and frankly it has no business being there. I don’t mind a bit of underlining of spelling mistakes, but having the system auto correct them is hugely frustrating. It would be annoying in a word processor, but when it starts doing them in my code editor and Terminal windows, I really lose it.

Terminal
For some reason Terminal now cannot handle using Nano (a Linux text editor) via an SSH connection, unless you change the terminal emulation from xterm-256color to xterm-color. If you don’t you’ll get random characters and garbage, and your text files will generally get screwed up. Apple don’t document this change, it’s up to us users to fiddle with the settings to get it to work again.

DigitalColor Meter
OS X has a brilliant utility called DigitalColor Meter. As a web developer this is hugely useful for quickly identifying hex values for colours on the screen. Only in OS X Lion you can’t do this any more, because Apple have removed the hex display option. Now you can only get RGB values. Why?

Scrolling
OS X Lion has reversed your scroll direction. Admittedly it makes more sense to push up when you want to scroll down – it’s the same action you would make in real life to push paper around – but I couldn’t get used to it. At least you can change it back.

Scrolling with a scrollbar is much more tricky though, since apps don’t have them any more. They appear briefly once you start scrolling (with mouse wheel or touchpad) and if you’re quick enough you can click and grab the scrollbar. I don’t like this. I want a scrollbar I can click and grab with my mouse.

Networking & Time Machine
In my office I have a CentOS Linux file server that runs Appletalk. Only, under OS X Lion, I couldn’t connect to any of my Appletalk shares. I had to recompile a new version on my Linux server to make them work again. Why does Lion not support all versions of Appletalk?

This is a much bigger problem if you use a network device for Time Machine backups, as many people do. There are loads of forum messages from users complaining that their network backup devices and NAS no longer work. Personally, I spent a great deal of time building my own network Time Machine backup service on my Linux fileserver. This works perfectly under Snow Leopard, but refuses to work under Lion. Presumably this is because almighty Apple only want you to use their own Time Capsule.

Stability & Speed
My MacBook Air has crashed more times with Lion in 2 weeks than every Mac I have ever owned in the past 8 years. On top of that, I now get to see the rainbow beachball of death with monotonous regularity. Lion has definitely slowed down my previous lightning fast MacBook Air.

Conclusion
Lion is nothing more than a dumbing down of OS X. A stripping of functionality and a funnelling of users into a rigid computing environment where Apple becomes the mighty overlord. Pro users like myself are cast aside as Apple try to appeal to the lowest common denominator. They have turned their sophisticated, secure, stable and fast operating system into a shadow of its former self.

Limited functionality works on a smartphone and a tablet, but I don’t want it on my £1200 computer, thanks very much.

I have gone back to Snow Leopard and I will not consider re-installing Lion until these problems are fixed. Frankly, I think Apple should split OS X into two products like Windows: Home and Professional. The Home version becomes all “Fisher Price” like Lion is now, and the Pro version could be like a proper OS with proper features.

If it doesn’t get sorted out, my next development machine will be a PC and it will be running Linux.