My personal opinion of 10.8

[kikuchiyo]

.7 has been a buggy unpolished release introducing new features almost no one who's been using macs for some time has really found them especially helpful

I've been using Macs since before Tiger and while I have had a lot of problems with Lion, Fullscreen has changed my workflow for the better.

iCloud integration means I have been able to dump Google Calendar and Contacts. Changes made on my phone automagically propagate to my computer. iCal has gone from some weird app I started up a handful of times between 2005 and this year to being an auto-login application.

Different desktops with different backgrounds has improved my work flow as I immediately know "where" I am in my Desktops.

 

[nuckinfutz]

I don't recall that.... I certainly didn't. I loved the upgrade just as I had all the ones prior to it. That was not the case for Lion. I certainly didn't recall this much complaining almost a year after Snow Leopards release.

Lion is a mess for Apple, and they (and more importantly, their users) know it which is why Snow Leopard is still the biggest share of the mac os x user base. The advertised features of Mountain Lion are "Notes" and "Reminders" apps?!?! Thats because the real goal of it was to fix Lion's issues and put it behind them. You probably won't see them make a TV commercial out of that one...

I too loved the update because it was about cleaning out the innards and preparing the underpinnings for more rapid advancement. It had very little new "chrome" which was the center of most the complaints if memory serves me well.

The chief complaints that I read about Lion are typically the inflexibility of the new UI features like Auto Save, Versions & Mission Control. I view these as easily fixable as they are surface features. Behind the scenes plenty of work happened on Lion to move it forward architecturally.

As for the advertised features it makes sense to me. Apple is reaching out to computer users with a wide dynamic range of expertise in computers.

The average Mac user probably doesn't want to be bored with technicalities. They want a "take home" message. The ones with good tech knowledge have to do more sleuthing to find out what important changes have happened behind the scenes.

Lion, IMO, was more of a UI gaffe by Apple that I expect will largely be remedied via Mountain Lion.

 

[blow45]

I've been using Macs since before Tiger and while I have had a lot of problems with Lion, Fullscreen has changed my workflow for the better.

iCloud integration means I have been able to dump Google Calendar and Contacts. Changes made on my phone automagically propagate to my computer. iCal has gone from some weird app I started up a handful of times between 2005 and this year to being an auto-login application.

Different desktops with different backgrounds has improved my work flow as I immediately know "where" I am in my Desktops.

Ok, cool, glad you found three things useful. I had mm and would have liked iCloud on sl, so syncing hasn't been an addition for me, all the more so when I had, thank god for that btw, go to Dropbox and lose keychain sync. I appreciate your honesty for commenting that you had many problems with lion as well. Full screen I find useful to, but buggy and slow so far, plus many programs I used had a full screen mode anyway. I am not trying to play down its importance, it's a good addition. I concur i made a generalisation in my original post, to make a point, of course you can't have a new os, from apple for that matter, and find exactly zero new things helpful for most users. That wouldn't have been a poor release, that would have been akin to the titanic in os releases.

But by and large what I said is true, apple's additions, esp. core iOS inspired "features" almost no one has found them particularly useful, on the contrary most people have found them particularly annoying. I ask you in all honesty, if you could have sl with iCloud, would now consider downgrading, or upgrading rather to it? I know I would.

@nukkin. Well put, it was a ui gaffe, but i also think it also showcased poor core os development as well. It seems something is deeply broken with resource management, and the added ui features and layers on top make it even more apparent. Superb advances in ssd and CPU technology can mask it in some systems, but apple has been over reliant on these. 4gb macs are currently the minimum for running basic usage scenarios on macs, and this shouldn't be the case, all the more so when a good number of the line up, some airs for example max out at 4gb.

 

[Rychy]

Besides general bugginess, braking Spaces is the thing I probably hate most about Lion. If they'd just bring back how it worked in Leopard / Snow Leopard, I'd be a bit happier with Mountain Lion.

Another thing that simply annoys me is the continuing uglification of the UI. I was always hoping for a more uniform UI across applications. Now we're looking at legal pads, index cards, torn calendar pages, address books ... is the next major release of iTunes going to look like a jukebox?

 

[kikuchiyo]

But by and large what I said is true, apple's additions, esp. core iOS inspired "features" almost no one has found them particularly useful, on the contrary most people have found them particularly annoying. I ask you in all honesty, if you could have sl with iCloud, would now consider downgrading, or upgrading rather to it? I know I would.

All I was saying was that your original statement, that anyone with experience with Mac OS is sick of Lion, is untrue. You should be more precise. I knew you'd reply saying "well, what I said is still true, mostly."

And honestly, as for my individual opinion, no I wouldn't downgrade to Snow Leopard. I like Fullscreen. I like Resume, mostly. Abandoning Rosetta hit me hard, but not nearly as hard as I thought it would and it was a necessary move. If it weren't for some UI errors I'd have almost no issue with Lion. I've still got SL on my Mac Mini HTPC/server and it's fine there, but for my day to day machine I'm relatively happy with SL (or I would have nuked it from space and reinstalled SL). Even with iCloud, I'd probably stay on Lion until ML is released.

 

[blow45]

All I was saying was that your original statement, that anyone with experience with Mac OS is sick of Lion, is untrue. You should be more precise. I knew you'd reply saying "well, what I said is still true, mostly."

And honestly, as for my individual opinion, no I wouldn't downgrade to Snow Leopard. I like Fullscreen. I like Resume, mostly. Abandoning Rosetta hit me hard, but not nearly as hard as I thought it would and it was a necessary move. If it weren't for some UI errors I'd have almost no issue with Lion. I've still got SL on my Mac Mini HTPC/server and it's fine there, but for my day to day machine I'm relatively happy with SL (or I would have nuked it from space and reinstalled SL). Even with iCloud, I'd probably stay on Lion until ML is released.

I didn't claim it's still true mostly, I claimed it's still true period, to the extent one can generalise and imply that they are not referring to every single user on the globe.

I think just before the parentheses you meant to say lion, happy you can make it work on a mini, I had nothing but trouble with it ona brand new 4gb mini. I am also happy that you mostly like resume, makes for a nice change when you do find someone who actually likes it even for the most part. Anyway, if you are a happy camper with lion, I honestly happy for you, at least some people still enjoy using os x despite apple's best efforts to make life hard for us.

 

[blow45]

I don't recall that.... I certainly didn't. I loved the upgrade just as I had all the ones prior to it. That was not the case for Lion. I certainly didn't recall this much complaining almost a year after Snow Leopards release.

Lion is a mess for Apple, and they (and more importantly, their users) know it which is why Snow Leopard is still the biggest share of the mac os x user base. The advertised features of Mountain Lion are "Notes" and "Reminders" apps?!?! Thats because the real goal of it was to fix Lion's issues and put it behind them. You probably won't see them make a TV commercial out of that one...

I had missed your post, very intelligently observered, you are the first one who's said it from what I ve read, and it makes absolute sense that ml inst a way to have something against windows 8 but to fix some core lion usability problems (core code problems they don't have the time or programming teams to do so so sadly) and quickly put it behind them...very astutely observed indeed. And of course you can't do a keynote about it and you have to prerelease it to people like Gruber who **** themselves if they get a call from apple marketing and meet in a posh hotel suite with Schiller over cocktails, and then go one to write about it as if they had been debriefed for a mission critical space exploration project finally validating the existence of extra terrestrial life.

 

[kikuchiyo]

I think just before the parentheses you meant to say lion

You're right. My mini is running SL, my aging MBP is running Lion. Lion has issues, but on the balance I'm OK with it. That's all I wanted to point out. Thanks for being polite