OS X Lion

Lion is the finest version of Mac OS X to date. It’s the sort of operating system nerds would go stand in line for… if they could. But instead you can download it right now (assuming you haven’t already).

Over the past several months I have been using the early developer previews of Lion. For me, it is not the headline features of Lion that make it such a compelling and noteworthy release. Rather, it is the thousand little refinements that all add up to what is, in my opinion, the most attractive and usable operating system on the planet.

There are some big things in Lion that stand out as the hallmark features — such as Launchpad and Mission Control — but these are not so much features as they are usability enhancements. And to me, that is what Lion is all about: enhancements.

There are a thousand subtle changes that all add up to something fine. Scrollbars have been removed and now only subtly appear when you are actually scrolling. Buttons are now a more classy square shape. Many icons are now monochrome. For the next several months you’ll be stumbling across all sorts of things that look or act better than they did in previous versions of OS X.

Even Safari’s default page for “You are not connected to the internet” has been massively updated. The old version was jarring; the new one is gorgeous. How many thousands of times have you seen that stark white page because a server wasn’t responding or the public wi-fi was acting up? It has always been jarring to me, and it’s been that way for years. But now, in Safari 5.1, you see a classy, well-designed error page. It is much more inviting and friendly. The former was ugly, but the current is art.

Here’s how Safari 1 looked when you reached a page that wasn’t responding, or if you tried to load a site while your computer wasn’t connected to the Internet:

Safari 1 Error Display

And Safari 2:

Safari 2 Error Display

Safari 3 and 4:

Safari 3 and 4 Error Display

And now, Safari 5:

Safari 5 Error Display

This “You are not connected to the Internet” design is, in a way, the quintessential example of what is different between Lion and all the previous versions of OS X before it.

There are many things like this sprinkled all throughout the OS. There are many subtle refinements which, when experienced, you don’t just think I’m glad they added this, because this is cool. Instead, you think how is it that OS X never had this before? This is the way it should be.1

And so, herein is a list of miscellaneous thoughts and observations about the greatest operating system on the planet:

Launchpad

Perhaps the single most notable new feature of Lion is Launchpad.

With the advent of Launchpad in Lion there are now three built-in application launchers in Mac OS X: The Dock, Spotlight, and Launchpad. It just goes to show what a hurdle it is to handle application installation, organization, and access. In conjunction with the Mac App Store, Launchpad is, in my opinion, a fantastic way to store and access applications.

But do I actually use Launchpad? Nope. Primarily because Launchpad is mouse friendly and I live and die by the keyboard. To activate Launchpad you take four fingers on the trackpad and pinch them together. It is awkward at best on my 2008 MacBook Pro even though I bought a Magic Trackpad to use with Lion. I much prefer to Command+Space into my application launcher of choice: LaunchBar.

Mission Control

The second most notable feature of Lion is Mission Control. Mission Control is sort-of like Exposé on steroids, and I use it because there is no way not to use it if you use Exposé. But, I don’t think to myself how happy I am about Mission Control.

Mission Control truly shines if you use Spaces — which I do not. I have all my application windows stacked on top of one another in just one Desktop space. And so, Mission Control, while more organized and intelligent than Exposé, is not significantly more useful to me.

If you use hot corners they have been improved as well. The hot corner for showing all the windows of the frontmost application now also displays a coverflow-like view of all recent documents:

Application Windows and Recent Documents

The Mac App Store

The more I use the Mac App Store, the more I appreciate it. It is great to have all your apps centralized in one hub. You can download them onto any computer and all you need is your Apple ID. It makes switching to a new Mac or setting up a new install much simpler.

The way it works differently in Lion is that apps you download go into LaunchPad, and then the LaunchPad Dock icon bounces once. This is far more elegant and scalable than the way apps installed in Snow Leopard, which was to download right into the Dock.

Full-Screen Apps

I have a love-hate relationship with full-screen apps. Partly because I love screen real estate. But full-screen apps seem to have been made with laptops in mind. Most of the apps look great on the smaller screen of a laptop, but not so great on a larger display.

I have this not-so-special theory that Apple’s flagship Mac is the MacBook Air. Full-screen apps scale best on smaller screens. I believe that Lion has been, in a way, specifically designed for the Air.

Mail

Some changes to an operating system are instantly welcomed, while others take time to get used to. Mail is in the latter camp. It goes without saying that this new look for Mail on the Mac has a very big nod back to Mail on the iPad. I did not like this all-new look at first, but now I have grown to appreciate it.

There are a few bits that I still do not appreciate, however. Such as: (1) the way a new reply message “bounces out” from the original message; and (2) the way a message window slides up and off the screen when you send it.

For those who cannot handle the new look of Mail, there is a setting to go back to the original layout under Preferences → Viewing. Note, however, that even when reverting to the previous layout, the aforementioned annoying animations will still be there.

Perhaps my favorite new feature in Mail is the enhanced search capabilities. When searching for a particular email you are offered suggested search terms — not unlike Google suggestions — that recommend people, subjects, attachments, etc. These search suggestions are both intelligent and useful.

And my favorite new design element in Mail is the look of the popovers you see when adding an event or creating a new contact — both of which are very nice.

New Event Popover in Lion Mail

Auto-Saving and Versioning of Files

Not all apps auto-save just yet. And for those that do (specifically TextEdit and Preview), I haven’t yet decided if it’s a service or a burden. It’s nice that you can quit without worrying about saving or choosing a spot to save, but I primarily use TextEdit as a scratchpad, not as a writing tool. I am always tossing bits of text into TextEdit that usually have a short lifespan. So, whenever I quit TextEdit, I have to CMD+W and then CMD+Q.

Quitting doesn’t prompt you to save, but closing a window does. I find this behavior to be equally great and maddening. If you don’t want to restore windows when you’re quitting and re-opening apps, you can turn it off in System Settings → General. Though, there is not an option for asking you to save on quit. If you quit with unsaved documents, then they are restored when you open the app again.

Version control, however, is fabulous. Not that I use it often, but it is done so very well. You get to it by hovering over the top titlebar in an application and clicking on the triangle that appears.

Title Bar and Version Options

You are then presented with some options to revert to the last time this document was saved, lock this version, duplicate it, or compare versions.

Comparing versions launches you into a TimeMachine-esque zone where you have the current version on the left and a pile of previous versions on the right.

Comparing Versions of a Document in Lion

Various UI and UX Changes

Miscellany

  • The Apple logo on the boot-up screen is more “letterpressed.”

  • When launching an app, the window launches from the center of the screen and opens up outwards, like an app does in iOS.

  • The classic stop-light buttons in the top-left corner of all windows are now a more muted red, yellow, and green.

  • The icons in the Finder window sidebar are now all monochrome. Personally, I like the new color scheme of more muted colors in some areas and the monochrome in others. To me, it all feels more refined and less frilly.

Plug and Play with an External Monitor

I adore the way Lion manages laptops and external monitors. I find it much more user-friendly than the way previous versions of OS X have managed it.

The tried-and-true behavior of how OS X deals with a laptop and an external monitor has been this:

  • With the laptop lid closed and the computer asleep: Plug an external display, wake the computer, and the external display will be the only working display. If you were to then open your laptop lid while an external display is running, the laptop’s screen stays off.

  • With the laptop lid open and the computer awake: Plug an external display in and you have two working screens. If you were to then close your laptop lid, the computer would go to sleep.

In Lion, this behavior has been greatly improved:

  • With the laptop lid closed and the computer asleep: Plug an external display in, wake the computer, and the external display will be the only working display. If you were to then open your laptop lid, the laptop’s screen would turn on and you have two working monitors.

  • With the laptop lid open and the computer awake: Plug an external display in and you have two working screens. If you were to then close your laptop lid, the laptop’s screen turns off and the external monitor becomes the only working monitor.

In short, opening and closing your laptop’s lid is like adding or removing a second display, and does not affect putting the computer to sleep.

It may sound silly, but this is perhaps one of my favorite new features in Lion.

Rubber-Band Scrolling

Once you get used to the rubber-band scrolling of list views and windows there is no going back. As I mentioned above, I have been using the Developer Previews of Lion since March. When switching over to Snow Leopard, the lack of rubber-band scrolling was the most annoying “missing” features. It is one of those things that once you get used to it, it feels completely natural.

Dashboard

The Dashboard got an unfortunate makeover. Ever since OS X 10.4 Tiger I have found the Dashboard extremely useful. Partly because I use the Mint web-stats widget, but also because I keep a calculator, the calendar, weather, and a few sticky notes there. Hitting F4 to invoke the dashboard is nearly second nature. But now, instead of zooming into focus like it has since 2005, the Dashboard is its own space that slides over from the left. And it brings with it a new dotted background texture which I find highly unattractive.

If you want to return your Dashboard to its previous look and behavior, you can do so by unchecking the option to “Show Dashboard as a space” within the Mission Control settings in System Preferences.

Application Windows

Application windows now have rounded window corners all around. Previously, only the top-left and top-right corners were rounded. Now all four are. And, speaking of application windows, there is less window chrome in general. Thanks mostly in part to the new scrollbar.

The new, minimalistic scrollbar is copied and pasted right out of iOS. It only appears when the window you’re in is moving, and it’s intelligent enough to be a dark color on a light background and a light color on a dark background.

Other tidbits include:

  • The ability to grab any edge of an application window and resize it. (Try holding Shift or Alt while doing so.)

  • The toolbar in the Finder window no longer has that dotted division line that you can put into a Finder window tool bar.

The Customize Toolbar Options in Lion's Finder

Auto Correct

Lion implements iOS-style auto-correcting of spelling. It literally looks just like on the iPhone / iPad:

Auto-Correct in Lion is just like iOS

It is great at catching misspellings, but I find that often times it will auto-correct to the proper spelling of the wrong word I was originally trying to spell.

If the new auto-correct really irks you, you can turn it off within System Preferences → Language & Text → Text. I appreciate it, but it needs a bit of babysitting from time to time.

The Hidden Library Folder

The ~/Library folder is now hidden. If you want to see it, a simple terminal command will unhide it:

chflags nohidden /Users/YOUR USERNAME/Library

The Dock

In the Dock you can choose to not display the blue icon orbs that glow to show that an app is active. In Dock Preferences there is an option to show indicator lights for open applications. These are turned off by default. Apple wants to eliminate the concept of an app running or not.

This concept won’t be fully realized until Macs are running SSDs and applications launch in split seconds, which means the option to not display the indicator lights for open applications is good news for all of us.

Roar

Lion is what OS X was meant to be: refined, attractive, and user-friendly.

As we’ve heard so many times from Apple, this is a “Back to the Mac” operating system. But Lion is more than just elements that pull from what we see and know on iOS. It is also full of hints that point to the future of Apple hardware and the amalgamation of iOS and OS X. It is exciting to see this big picture slowly coming into focus.

  1. However, one glance at the hideous new iCal UI and my theory is shot to pieces. ↵
OS X Lion

It’s Been a Good Quarter for Apple  →

Federico Viticci at MacStories reporting on Apple’s Q3 reports:

iPhone is growing 142% year over year, and with 9.25 million units sold the iPad saw a 183% increase over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold sold 7.54 million iPods with a 20% unit decline. The third quarter has been the best non-holiday Mac quarter ever, best iPhone quarter ever, best iPad quarter ever. There are now 28.7 million iPads out there, including 14 million units shipped this calendar year.

Perhaps “good” is an understatement.

It’s Been a Good Quarter for Apple

The Difference Between iOS and Android  →

Ryan Heise switched from an iPhone to a Nexus S about 6 weeks ago and has been documenting the experience. After a month with Android he wrote his initial thoughts, including what he sees as the main differences between iOS and Android:

It is the difference between Apple and Google. It is the stark contrast of a polished, holistic, curated computing experience and a mess of ideas, some implemented well, some implemented poorly, some not making any sense whatsoever. It is the difference in the feel between a finished product and a beta.

The Difference Between iOS and Android

Reading on the iPad

The iPad makes a fantastic reading device:

  • It carries all types of reading material in it at once: the books and magazines I’m reading, my RSS feeds, and any other Internet articles I want to read later. Its versatility in this regard is primarily what makes the iPad such a great reading device.

  • The battery lasts forever. There is little to no stress or issues related to using the iPad for long periods of time.

  • Since it’s connected to the Internet, I can get the latest news, buy a new book anytime I want, and download the latest magazines as soon as they’re available.

There are a few cons:

  • Though the iPad is thin and relatively light, it is not very easy to hold with one hand. And even when holding with two hands it still gets a bit heavy after holding it for a while.

  • You can’t read outside on a sunny day.

  • The iPad does not have a print-quality display like the Kindle or iPhone. And though the current display is not bad, a retina display on the iPad would certainly make the reading experience better.

My iPad’s primary function has always been as my reading device. I read and skim headlines in Reeder, I use Instapaper to catch up on articles I came across during the day, I read ebooks in iBooks, and I read Wired and The New Yorker in their respective apps.

Ironically, the worst reading experiences are with the apps designed by the “professionals” that are based on the age-old history of reading in print: Apple’s own iBooks, and the Condé Nast apps. The best reading experiences on the iPad are Instapaper and Reeder. In part because they are easy to keep up-to-date, but also because their designs have the least amount of frilly bits, and therefore make reading of the actual text the easiest.

A few months ago Frédéric Filloux wrote an article on Monday Note about the Publishing Failures on the iPad. In short, Frédéric’s point is that it’s nice to have your magazines all in one spot and delivered there via the Web, but there are some deal-breaking shortcomings. Such as: the time it takes to download a media-rich magazine app (in Frédéric’s case it took a few days for an issue of Vanity Fair), and the quality of reading on the iPad isn’t yet superior to a printed magazine.

Anyone who’s spent time with a magazine-ported-to-iPad app (such as the ones from Condé Nast or The Daily) knows the pain of having to wait for the app to download. When downloading an issue of Wired, you literally cannot do anything with your iPad but let it download the magazine issue. They weigh in around 300 MB and easily take 20 or 30 minutes to download on a decent Wi-Fi connection.

Downloading is the biggest of the pain points, but that’s not to say that once you’ve got an issue of the magazine onto your iPad that the reading experience is wonderful. It’s not so much in the layout itself, but in the attempt at being magazine-like. While I somewhat appreciate and enjoy the unique layout of the magazine articles, there is still something to be desired.

I don’t think the magazine industry has failed on the iPad, it just hasn’t hit a home run yet. This is what Frédéric was saying, and I think it’s what most of us would nod our heads to as well. In short, it’s time for the magazine industry to step it up.

Khoi Vihn said something similar in his article and follow-up on iPad Magazines last fall:

There are no easy answers for content publishers right now, which is why in some ways they can hardly be blamed for their iPad enthusiasm — at the very least, they aren’t ignoring the sea change that tablets represent. Perhaps like many of us, they need to fail their way to success. That’s a legitimate strategy, and if they’re nimble enough to recover from these wild miscalculations before it’s too late, then I applaud them for it.

More likely, they will waste too many cycles on this chimerical vision of resuscitating lost glories. And as they do, the concept of a magazine will be replaced in the mind — and attention span — of consumers by something along the lines of Flipboard. If you ask me, the trajectory of content consumption favors apps like these that are more of a window to the world at large than a cul-de-sac of denial.

And:

The strategy that these apps are following is a stand-in for true experimentation. True, it gets something into the market that can then be learned from, iterated and evolved. But in truth it’s really just stalling.

The default reaction of most print publishers since the advent of the Internet has almost always been “Let’s make it just like print.” It’s been tried again and again and it never works. So the fact that publishers are trying it yet again on the iPad doesn’t strike me as experimentation at all. There might be a grain of truth when we say that this is “an experimental year” for publishing on the iPad, yes. But that doesn’t mean we also need to repeat the same mistakes that we made when Flash promised that we could make Web sites flip pages like print magazines, or when the Web was still so new that the only model we had to understand it with was print publishing, or when CD-ROMs tried their best to recreate magazines in ‘multimedia’ form. Those lessons have been learned already.

The Print Mindset

There is a mindset that says printed content is of a higher quality and value than online content. Or, put another way, content in printed form has value simply by virtue of being printed. Therefore, the content provider is justified in selling that printed content, yet has a hard time selling non-printed content.

In part, this is due to soft costs versus hard costs of content creation and distribution. People don’t mind buying a magazine because they know there is a hard cost involved with printing it. On the Web the hard costs are less obvious to the average consumer; some people have a difficult time understanding the need to pay a company to cover its soft costs.

There is a history of value and novelty associated to the printed word. How can publishers build upon that value and novelty while fully embracing new technology and its delivery formats?

Randy Murray, in an article on the digitization of magazines, wrote:

While you can make a fully digital copy of a magazine, you lose something when it no longer exists as a separate, physical object.

And so — perhaps intentionally, or perhaps unintentionally — digital magazines that replicate their printed versions are, in some ways, feeding on the mindset that printed content has a higher value and novelty than digital content does.

They replicate their printed magazines in digital format because they are trying to convey some of that perceived quality and value that historically comes with the printed page. The reader may not be holding a piece of paper, but at least they’re looking at what would be the printed page through the window of their screen.

Unfortunately, replicating print onto a digital format doesn’t best serve the problems of great user experience, sharing through social media, and taking advantage of the rich media possibilities our iPads provide. It does, however, appease the publisher’s need to convey value with their content.

A Better User Experience

I don’t have the answer for Condé Nast and the other publishers about precisely what to fix in their distribution models and their layout and interaction designs. I do, however, have some thoughts about what is valuable and worthwhile to me as a reader.

For starters, here’s what I care about in a magazine subscription on my iPad:

  • Notify me when there’s a new issue.

  • When downloading the latest issue, I want an option to keep past issues downloaded on my iPad or else remove them. If removed, I want to be assured that I can download them again for free anytime I want.

  • When downloading the latest issue, the app should take advantage of iOS multitasking and complete the download in the background whenever possible. When it’s done downloading, it should notify me that the magazine is ready to read.

  • The app should remember where I left off reading when I quit it, and put me there again when I return.

  • I want the articles to be easy to read and have an attractive layout. I am a big fan of form and function, but never should the former win out over the latter.

One area of trouble with digital distribution of magazines on the iPad is that they’re trying to bridge a gap between two very different, but great, user experiences: print and iOS. A printed magazine has the tactile feel, 300 DPI text and images, and a long, rich history. iOS has animation, rich media, user interactions, and more. Digital magazines have been trying to find a middle ground between the two, and it’s not easy.

Instead of trying to find that spot between print and iOS, they should leave the historical traditions of print design altogether. Instead of leaning on the perceived value of a physical printed periodical they should look to the iPad’s new value of delight, ubiquity, and instantaneous digital access. Moreover, they need to find better ways to bring their articles to their iPad readership. Magazines need to cater their layout design and interaction design to the iPad rather than attempting to fit the iPad around their previous print-tested designs.

My favorite iPad apps to read in are Instapaper and Reeder. These two apps are free from unnecessary design elements and simply display large text on a simple background.

A “media-rich” article in Instapaper means there are inline images between paragraphs. Every article in Wired, however, is media rich with its custom graphics designed to compliment each article, fancy text layouts surrounding the graphics, and other frilly bits.

And while I appreciate the customization and care surrounding each article found in Wired or The New Yorker, wouldn’t it be something if the magazine industry took a few cues from Instapaper and Reeder? What if, instead of fancy, two-column layouts they had simple, large-type layouts that you could scroll through? Because, honestly, it’s the forced pagination and multitude of various layout designs that I dislike the most when reading in a magazine app.

Apps like Instapaper and Reeder offer more of a “reading environment” (like a library); Wired and The New Yorker are more like an amusement park with words. One isn’t better or worse than the other, but people who like to read a lot certainly don’t spend the majority of their reading time at a noisy amusement park.

Reading on the iPad

What if Everyone in the World Stopped Being Bored?  →

Scott Adams:

You might be there already. I know I am. If I have access to my phone, or my computer, I’m never bored. If I’m watching TV, I can fast-forward through commercials. If I’m standing in line at the store, I can check email or play Angry Birds. When I work out, I listen to my iPod. I wake up in the morning and walk straight to my iPad to browse the headlines while my coffee is brewing. The last thing I do before shutting my eyes at night is browse the news again on my phone. […] The only reliable place to be bored these days is in the shower.

Related (and required) reading: The Top Idea in Your Mind by Paul Graham.

What if Everyone in the World Stopped Being Bored?

[Sponsor] Palimpsest  →

Palimpsest for iPad presents a personalized stream of long-form magazine articles. These articles come from the archives of top magazines, including The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and many others. Your votes on previous articles influence which articles are presented to you in the future. Palimpsest is like a radio-station of fascinating articles; with no index and no way to jump ahead, it offers a layer of serendipity while letting you spend more time reading good articles and less time searching.

If you love reading long articles on your iPad, get Palimpsest in the App Store today.

[Sponsor] Palimpsest

Apple Finally Catches Up with iPad 2 Demand  →

Once a week I go out to morning coffee with a good friend. The Apple store is just two doors over from our favorite coffee shop, and for about a month or more after the iPad 2 launched there was a line for iPads every time we went to coffee.

After a couple weeks I thought it had something to do with new shipments coming in on Tuesdays, but the baristas told us that the line was like that every single day.

Apple Finally Catches Up with iPad 2 Demand