Hands-On With the OSX Lion Developer Preview | Hacker News Reader

Hands-On With the OSX Lion Developer Preview

newsgrange.com

24 pointsfredericl13 comments

People who’ve torrented this are commenting in the Apple subreddit, and a lot of them say that Apple’s not hiding any new features: everything in the DP has been talked about in the official rundown. It’s a pretty startling reverse from what generally happens with their hardware and iOS. It seems somewhat Microsoftian in a way, laying out a platform roadmap (albeit much shorter than what Microsoft does).

Boring old Mac OS X.

Apple knows that anything in a developer release will be leaked immediately anyway, so there's not much point in keeping things pseudo-secret. Also, there could still be Lion features that aren't in this developer release.

Except maybe the whole retina display support? http://www.macrumors.com/2011/02/24/mac-os-x-lion-building-i...

Alternatively maybe Apple's ability to hide new features is getting bettr?

Uh, that's no secret. Apple has been working towards resolution-independence for years now. Each of the last several OS releases has added more support for resolution independence, and more tools for helping developers achieve it (you can actually change the scale at which everything is drawn using Quartz Debug in the developer tools, but lots of the UI is fairly broken when scaled up). They haven't managed to quite get there yet, but it doesn't surprise me that Lion gets closer if not finally introducing the feature for real.

No indication that apps are running? That's an interesting choice. Granted, it will make apps seem to start incredibly fast, but I can't help but fear that I'm going to leave Eclipse and Photoshop running and murder my battery life...

Along with autosaving, restore, and instant quitting, I imagine they are moving to a model where the OS can quit apps for you to manage resources, as they do on iOS.

Having said that, it'll probably be a while before eclipse and photoshop play well.

That’s exactly it. The Dock already “lies” to you in Lion. The OS can kill processes if it runs low on memory without indicating that the app just quit and it will keep processes running if it has plenty of resources even if the user explicitly quits the app. (Developers have to allow the OS to do that.)

What annoys me about this is that to the user, the behavior seems unpredictable. Many apps now (appear to) quit automatically, i.e. they disappear from the Dock (which I think is better than the old way of apps hanging around forever in the Dock if you don’t quit them manually) but equally many apps don’t do that. That has been a problem before but in the past at least most apps did the same. Now you don’t know what’s going to happen.

Another problem are apps you want to run all the time like Mail or Skype. If you have Mail or Skype already in the Dock as a shortcut to launch the app, there is no way for you to tell whether you already launched to app or not. I find that to be extremely annoying. (You can re-enable the indicator in System Preferences, though.)

Like the disabling the transparent menubar and 3D dock, enabling the Dock indicator will be one of the first things I do on reinstalls.

Apps that don't normally live in your dock still only appear when running and you can also reenable the indicator lights in System Preferences.

One thing I haven't seen mentioned yet is that Safari now has iOS style pinch-to-zoom instead of awkwardly resizing the page elements / increasing font size.

You actually can change the trackpad scrolling back; it's just under the appearance prefpane rather than the trackpad prefpane.

Things I'd like to know:

1. Is Spaces still there, or has it been replaced by the unified Mission Control?

2. Do standard third party apps get the new crazy scrollbars by default when running on Lion?