I upgraded the Macbook Air to OSX Lion this morning. Not much to say yet; it took a long time to download the 3.49GB upgrade, but it installed in 30 minutes during the course of which I had to unplug the Macbook – I would never dare do this on a Windows machine, but it worked fine here.
The first thing I did was disable the new reverse touchpad scrolling thing – that is, what Apple did to bring OSX in line with iOS from a scroll usability perspective. To me, it was just counterintuitive – I am sufficiently used to computers (as opposed to tablets) that I don’t find it unnatural to switch between gesture modes.
I do have some other new touchpad gestures to learn, and it generally seems shiny. Will post further impressions if I notice anything significantly different in the days ahead.
I’m trying not to be upset that they upgraded the Macbook Air I just got four months ago.
{sigh}. Despite promising myself never to go over too far to the dark side, there are some aspects of OSX I’m loving and missing very much on the Windows machines I use. Some things I definitely am not happy about (the lack of a proper blogging client, for one), but here’s a few things I’ve twisted Windows into doing (or tried to) to mimic the capabilities of my Macbook. There was a recent Lifehacker post that inspired this one…
- Switcher / Expose clone. Much more practical than ALT-TAB, simple, small third party app.
- Two finger scrolling. The simple app doesn’t work on 64bit Windows 7 but I’m trying to mess around with this Synaptics touchpad hack – apparently despite the fact that most new PC touchpads are capable of multitouch gestures they are frequently locked out of using them!
Things I’d like to bring over….
- App store. I have to go through a manual FIlehippo trawl to keep my PC software up to date.
- Pinch to zoom etc., (which, infuriatingly, doesn’t work with Microsoft Mac applications)
- Sparrow!!! One of the most popular search terms on this blog is “Sparrow for Windows” so I know I’m not the only one. C’mon you guys!
- The instant sleep / wake and long battery life of OSX, and near instant boot time on the SSD
Things I’m not a fan of:
- Network settings on OSX. Feels too fiddly, locked down.
- New shortcuts. I’m starting to muddle Windows and Mac shortcuts, forgetting which is which
- Lack of decent, affordable blogging clients
- Resizing windows from any side. We had to wait through 7 iterations of OSX for that?
If you could create the bastard love child of Windows and OSX, what would you put in it?
Armand David's personal weblog: dadhood, technology, running, media, food, stuff and nonsense.
