Mac OS X Lion After Upgrading Review Notes

Well after upgrading to iOS 5 last week I found out iCloud does not work with OS X Snow Leopard. Yes that is a bit bizarre. So over the weekend I upgraded to OS X Lion. Here is a quick summary of my thoughts and findings with Lion.



UI Enhancements

You will get the most benefit from UI enhancements if you are using a trackpad. Switching desktops, and calling Expose (now called Mission Control) can all be controlled with a three finger swipe. Very cool.



Another feature of note is the direction of scrolling has been flipped. The idea is that scrolling should match the direction you use for a touch interface. However, my Mac doesn't have a touch interface. In addition, I'm constantly switching between Windows, Linux, and OS X. So changing the scrolling direction on one OS is really annoying. Thankfully you can still turn this off.



iCloud

Well it turns out the iCloud feature that I really want to use, music syncing, will not be available until the end of October. So enabling the feature has been a bit disappointing. You can sync bookmarks, address book, and calendars. However, unless this will work on other operating systems its kind of useless for me. GMail already keeps all my iOS devices synced and it works on any platform. I still need to do more investigation on syncing between Mac and Windows to really understand what works.



Other Surprises

Installing OS X Lion removes Java from your machine. You can download it from Apple and get it back easily. I did find this a bit odd. Also my Apache Web servers no longer worked on upgraded machines. I had to comment out the FastCGI plugin so Apache would start.



Overall

It has some nice enhancements and pretty much is not that different from Snow Leopard. All my apps seem to run fine (knock on wood), and stability seems to be good. So far so good. But I have to say, it sure was a lot of work just to be able to use iCloud. :)