![]() ![]() Unfortunately this doesn’t play nicely with the reversed scrolling and so iCal feels like it’s moving backwards when you swipe. Some of the gestures I loved from Snow Leopard- three finger swiping to go back and forward in Firefox and Finder, for example- require tinkering to restore their functionality under Lion (thanks Ronan!). Lion is inflexible in this regard and hopefully some developers will step in to aid those who demand greater customisation. I want my computer to work the way I tell it to- through augmentation, if necessary- and not the other way around. ![]() If there’s one thing power users hate, it’s adaptation. It’s like playing a game with no option to invert the camera controls: you just have to adapt. ![]() It takes some getting used to, especially when I’ve spent the past two years swiping down for Exposé and now have to swipe up. Using three fingers, you can skim between various desktops and full-screen apps. It pervades every corner of the user interface: a pinching motion gives quick access to all your apps, while an outward flinging gesture shows the desktop. Snow Leopard already supported multi-touch gestures, but Lion takes it much further. If you have an older MacBook with a physical click button separate from the tracking area, performing new gestures in Lion feels cramped. This is great for two reasons: Apple’s trackpads have always been the best in the industry and their mice have always been the worst. Mouse owners should note that Lion works best with a trackpad, be that on a laptop or a ‘Magic’ Bluetooth option. Scroll bars were useful in the days before the wheel mouse, but when was the last time you actually clicked and dragged on one? When you reach the end of a scrolling area, there’s a nice elasticated bounce with which iPhone and iPad users will be familiar. To be honest, we’re better off without the cruft. Scroll bars have disappeared and only come into view when you’re scrolling (assuming you’re using an app that’s been optimised for Lion). Someone will release a third-party utility for this, but they shouldn’t need to. With a mouse, it makes less sense, and Lion can’t remember separate scroll settings for a mouse and a trackpad. As someone who uses Snow Leopard every day on all sorts of machines, this is a tad confusing! ‘Pushing the content’ is a better metaphor when using a trackpad than scrolling a viewing window over your document, which is essentially what the traditional scroll bar does. It feels revoltingly alien at first, then it becomes natural: I’m not sure which way is better, but the reversed scrolling puts Lion at odds with every other operating system including previous versions of OS X. Push up with two fingers to scroll down and vice versa. In Lion, scrolling is reversed to mimic scrolling in iOS. Is it possible to reconcile iOS and Mac OS X, and is that something we really want?Īlthough Lion looks similar to Snow Leopard, you’ll soon realise you can’t scroll up and down any more. However, iPhones are for poking and touching, while computers are for mousing and keyboarding. Since iOS has arguably the best user interface of any operating system, mobile or otherwise, that’s no bad thing. Lion is Apple’s attempt to bring the best of iOS to the Mac. ![]() It’s a great operating system, just like Leopard was. I’m eagerly awaiting the release of iOS 5, but I don’t have any real issues with Snow Leopard. I couldn’t go back to Windows as my day-to-day system, but that doesn’t mean I have the same level of excitement for OS X as when I first switched. I say ‘migration’ but it felt more like fleeing from a warzone, watching as my friends were stranded in a horrible wasteland of terrible user interfaces and awesome video games. We’ve been through a lot: this summer marks my third anniversary of my migration from Windows. That’s what your initial experience of Mac OS X Lion feels like, if you’re as anally retentive about how OS X performs as I. Is the new layout any better? I don’t care. I am doomed to wander around, banging my shins into the coffee table until I learn the new layout. It took me years to get everything exactly how I liked it: I don’t even think I can move things back to the way they were. ![]()
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