I have updated my system to Lion the very next day Apple released it and to be quite honest, it was a pain. I guess this is the very first time I have updated OSX to a newer version and regretted doing it. Although admittedly, I should have done a clean install, but I really have very little time to do this so I opted to do just the upgrade from Snow Leopard. Big mistake.
OSX Lion sure is fast though, and I am with Apple in making the UI cleaner and minimal. However, there are a few bit and pieces of it that I think the Apple engineers shouldn’t have touched at all. Here’s a list of things I found broken or needed to be fixed on the new OS:
That Damn Scrolling
For the love of God, Apple, why touch this? I understand that the scrolling we have all gotten used to is WRONG. But for fuck’s sake, why correct it and make it the DEFAULT setting on Lion? Just give us a heads up and say “Yo, there’s an option here on the preferences if you wanna be on the right side of scroll world but if you wanna stick to the old shit, that’s ok.” Or maybe I just need to get a magic trackpad?
Status: Adjusted via System Preferences
Photoshop CS5 Font Preview Rendering
Why am I not surprised that Adobe is on this list? When I updated to Lion, Photoshop CS5 kept showing me that it was busy doing something literally every 10 seconds through a lovely spinning beach ball of death. I wait for about 15 seconds, start doing my shit then bam, there it is again. There was no way I would be able to use this thing properly. I had to uninstall, reinstall, test and re-test only to discover that the only solution for this would be to turn the damn font preview thing off. For some reason, I felt relieved that it was as simple as that. God knows what else is going to be wrong in the future with Adobe.
Status: Corrected by turning font preview off on Photoshop CS5 Preferences.
Little Snitch
I wrote a whole shitload of sentences here but realized that if you know Little Snitch then you know exactly what it is for. If you don’t, Google is your friend. Unfortunately, my all-time favorite little app needs a serious update with Lion, and with that update comes… ka-ching, a price. WHY!? Why do I need to pay again for stuff I already bought? Up until this whole mess is sorted, I will just continue using their trial version 2 and perpetually click DEMO every 3 hours. Sigh.
Status: In Limbo
Save Me from AutoSave, Versions and Auto-Restore
Ok, I admit, I don’t have a clue as to what, how or even when this AutoSave and Versions feature of Lion is kicking in. What I know is, it just saves whatever the hell I’m doing and let’s it stays there until you close it off or save it. What’s annoying about it is that you will never know whether a Save As will actually do a proper Save As or will just do a new version. And don’t get me started with Auto-Restore. Illustrator crashed on me several times only to launch all of my previously opened documents which were properly closed and were not needed at all during the restart.
Status: Adjusted via System Preferences, Auto Restore in Limbo
Update: After several attempts to fix Little Snitch, it was apparent that I needed to rollback my system to Snow Leopard. the process wasn’t easy as most of my mails were converted to the newer Mail version and I had to archive them. The Snow Leopard Mail will not readLion email archives so be warned.
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