What we know about Mac OS X Lion
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
This doesn't make sense to me from a design sense. With an iPhone or iPad, your finger was touching the screen, so it emulated real "dragging" content down to where you could see it. With a computer however, there's a disconnect between the screen and your fingers, which makes it not as intuitive. Combine this with a few years of two finger scrolling being the exact opposite, and I feel like this will kind of be a pain to get used to.
What is a problem is that everyone is used to dragging the scroll bar, not the page but I’m not sure whether that’s going to be a big problem. I tried it and my brain already flipped for vertical scrolling after an hour or so. (I still get horizontal scrolling wrong.)
...which means you should go with the mechanism people have already internalized. I thought that was a key principle of UI design: if you don't have a good reason to violate established expectations, don't do it.
Sure that's good advice for beginners, but Apple is good at design. They know the rules and the know when to break them. This is how design evolves; because great designers can imagine how something new could ultimately be better once users get used to it.
If you just follow all the rules you end up like Jakob Nielsen, with a data-backed justification for every detail, all of which adds up to something inelegant and ugly as sin.
I'm a two-finger scroller on my Macbook, I'd be willing to accept the argument that there are actually more people doing it in the iOS way now.
It also runs counter to scroll wheels on mice, which has a physical reason for the direction too.
One finger drags the cursor up and down
Two finger drags the underlying page up and down
Four finger drags the underlying space left, right, up or down
Perfectly consistent, no? I won't argue that forcing people to relearn scrolling is an uphill battle. But I'm a Dvorak typist.
- Page Up scrolls the page down
- Up arrow (eventually) scrolls the page down, too.
Looking at it that way, the only exception is be single finger drag. I guess that 'has' to be that way because otherwise dragging a finger down a bit would be too different from lifting it shortly, then clicking a bit down.
"Multitouch trackpads that only support two-finger gestures will not have an option to reverse the scrolling direction in the Trackpad System Preferences pane."
I assume the Magic Mouse only supports two-finger gestures, so maybe that explains it. Either way, I had a really hard time getting used to it.
I ended up having to revert to Snow Leopard thanks to issues with Dropbox, Evernote and NewsRack anyway, but I'd be surprised if that scrolling behavior and a lot of the new UI weirdness actually makes it to the final Lion GM. We'll see.
I haven't tried my magic mouse on Lion yet, so I hadn't run into that problem yet.
The UI is a bit clunky, though. OS X switches to a fullscreen Time Machine view which felt way too jarring to me.
The locking behavior is also very well thought out. Additionally to automatically locking documents after two weeks, Lion also (better) exposes this functionality in the UI. All this helps to make it much less likely that you will ever accidentally overwrite an old document you used as a template. (When you start editing a locked document a dialog pops up telling you that the document is locked and the default option is not unlock but duplicate which is great.)
I don't think this will break many web dev tools. Unless you mean stuff like Sequel Pro or TextMate; even then, I can't imagine most apps won't make the transition smoothly.
With the Xcode 4 unix tools installed I had massive build problems with homebrew. Not being able to build mysql, node.js, thinking-sphinx, redis, mongo et al would constitute a pretty broken web dev environment, so if Lion requires the newer version, which most tools don't yet build cleanly under, that's a pretty big problem.
About time, considering the trainwreck that is the Snow Leopard version.
Please, dear god, make that apple finally created something that lets me browse my files as fast again as it was on my Amiga 500 in 1988. Clocked at 7.09 MHz. On floppy disks. I'm sure my 2 GHz machine can do this. It must be possible.
When is the Finder slow for you? I never had problems with a slow Finder.
The Dashboard, all spaces and all fullscreen apps are displayed along the top of the Exposé view. It’s now possible to change the background image for each space individually but no longer possible to arrange Spaces in a grid (there is always a row of spaces). Clicking on a space in Exposé displays all its windows in Exposé mode. The bird’s-eye view of only the spaces is gone but you can drag windows in Exposé from one space to another. The arrow key Spaces shortcuts also allow you to switch to the Dashboard or fullscreen apps.
Proportional-style windows make so much more sense than the grid-based layout. I'm thrilled that they've reverted back to that for Lion's exposé, using the grid for the new Mission Control view.