Problems I have personally hit in Mac OS X Lion

Posted by: bob on Friday July 29th 2011 2 comments
Tags: bugs, osx lion, usability

Here is a list of all the bugs and problems I have personally encountered in Mac OS X Lion. As I hit more, I will update this post. At the very end after being harsh I will list praises I have for Lion.

[update] August 1, 2011

Bugs

[new] Roughtly 50% of the time dragging from the sidebar of Preview does nothing. Generally I drag images from the side bar to a folder on my desktop to create a copy in that folder. Also, see the Usability section.
Losing Launchpad icons in the void between Launchpad and Reality. Once there (they bug out when trying to rearrange them sometimes) they are unresponsive and require a full logout.
Image Capture utility the checkbox “Delete after import” no longer deletes after import. I use this on my iPhone all the time.
Desktop Hot Corners, overly sensitive when I am working so I constantly shut off my monitor which I have set to the lower right corner. However by the time I want to go to bed the corners quit working completely until I go into the settings and turn them off and back on.
When Resume is disabled, the checkbox on the shut down / logout screen is still checked by default. It should not be.

Usability Problems

[new] Preview forces the sidebar on the left. Mac Desktop sorts Icons from the right side of the screen. This means dragging icons from the Preview sidebar to an Icon on the Desktop means I have to drag across more than 60% of the desktop width. My Macbook is widescreen. Sidebar side needs to be an option. Part of me thinks it used to be one…
Natural scrolling needs to allow setting each axis separately. I want natural scrolling when I swipe left and right, but I want normal scrolling for up and down. Inverted up and down scrolling only makes sense to me when I am physically touching the actual screen such as on my phone. On my macbook touch pad, magic pad, or magic mouse, the distance disconnection ruins it.
Preview is directly integrated with Versions. Versions is dumb. Preview was the best quick tool ever in 10.6. How it was then is exactly how I want it back, same menu options (Save As… Save All… etc). When I am editing dirty photos I do not want multiple versions floating around in the OS X nether, am I making sense?
I cannot delete things from Launchpad unless the item is from the App Store
The Apps in the App store need to quit installing installers and install the real app. Seriously.
When Dashboard is shown as a space I have been unable to change the background from the ugly grey bubbles to something like an actual wallpaper.
Didn’t the bundled PHP used to include PECL? So I could do things like install modules easy?

Bold statements I wish to make

Versions sounds like a personal privacy nightmare as far as digital forensics… remember when our iPhones were logging our locations for eternity how big of a deal that was to people who have a phobia of being arrested?

Back on the topic of Preview. As now there is no save option or even a confirm dialog, preview just saves when you exit – what if I did not want to bother saving one of the 10 I opened? Oh just revert back to a previous version! OK like I said I do not want to keep a history of previous version of pictures that may be embarrassing. Also… where do all the versions go? I am already running low on disk space. Oh, just lock all the files! OK and you do not see how that can get annoying having to lock stuff all the time? Oh, just set the lock time to 1 day! OK and you think I want to wait 1 day just so I do not have to manually lock them?

Basically, Versions just needs a 100% kill switch option, perhaps it even does and it just has not been discovered. Spotlight had one, it could be killed and prevented completely through a few console commands.

Good things about Lion

Best new feature: when I have multiple files selected and I right click, now I have “make new folder and put these things in it”.
I like how my terminal tabs have spinners on them now while things are processing.
The new login screen is pretty nice.
My World of Warcraft is running a little smoother in Lion, as in slightly higher frame rate and less random drops in frame rate and stutters.
Spotlight seems snappier too.

comment by Steve on Tuesday August 9th at 11:19am

I also dislike versions and auto-save. What about people who aren't tech heads and don't know how it works. If one of these opened a pic thinking just to crop it and did this then saved. Then started fooling around with it (drew moustache on mother-in-law for example) then closed not noticing it didn't ask anything about wanting to save. Wife comes home and says "oh my mum asked me to send the pics you took on the weekend"... Well it could happen, easily I think. It needs a kill switch like you say. Other parts of the OS are fantastic like full page apps and gestures in Safari.

» reply to this «

comment by bob on Tuesday August 9th at 2:00pm

@Steve:

i totally agree. though that would be funny to do to your mother in law. and on top of all of that, when i use it to crop 30+ photos really fast with no save option... so i resign and click Quit, it sits there for about 8 seconds before it drops down a dialog window "hang on, i am still trying to save all these"