Comment by hackoder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hackoder | Hacker News Reader

For those criticizing- He has given one example of what he thinks is wrong. Not all posts are meant to be essays...

Briefly though, (as another user who switched from Mac OS X), I can certainly give examples of what he says:

Not all of these are specific to OS X, its the overall hardware and software that is getting frustrating.

More user-hostile

- If you replace your SuperDrive with another drive, you CAN NOT boot any operating system (other than Apple's) off usb drives or even external DVD drives plugged into usb slots. So with two hard drives, you can not install Windows or Linux. [1]

- Batteries are not considered user-swappable anymore. [2]

More buggy

- Battery life degradation when moving from SL to Lion. Apple forums are full of examples. [3] (78 page thread, no confirmation or fix from Apple).

- We all know how annoying the switch to Mission Control was, right?

[1] http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1125135

[2] http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1756

[3] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3194235?start=0&tst...

[Edit: formatting]

Worst parts of Lion over OS X:

1) Removed "Save As". You now have to duplicate and then save the file.

2) Smaller resize/minimize/"maximize" buttons.

3) The green maximize button still doesn't maximize.

4) Switched default behavior with mouse scrolling.

5) Generally slower and more resource intensive, noticeable on older (2009) Macbook Pros.

6) Terrible, lengthy switch over from the previous version of FileVault, if you had that enabled.

7) Crashed a lot of programs initially, especially Chrome. Now not as much, but very crashy a few months ago.

8) Strange full screen behavior.

I get where they're going with this (iOS-y) but this is just a horrible neither-here-nor-there solution. Dual monitors makes it a true joke.

Seriously, wtf is up with removing "Save As"? I had to copy the text from a file I was working on and paste it into a new file because the "Save a new version" option wasn't doing anything.

One you missed: really horrible auto-correct feature Apple added. It will replace a word when you're in the middle of typing it. Completely broken and totally transparent. At first, I thought that WriteRoom was just buggy.

Oh, and the "Home" folder isn't exposed under the Favorites section of Finder by default anymore. You have to go to "Go > Home". Took me a little while to figure that one out.

Save as doesn’t make sense if the app auto-saves.

"Save as" is usually used when you want to save it as a different file somewhere else, and most people have cmd-shift-s ingrained in their mind.

This no longer exists and there's no excuse. Autosaving doesn't even do the same job.

I don’t think you understand. This is about paradigm shifts.

Here is how it used to work: You open this old document because you want to create a new one and use the old one as a template. You either Save as right away or (much more likely) you edit for a bit and do a Save as at some later point.

If you do this with auto save you are fucked. (Well, not really. There is now Versions, so starting with Lion this is finally a recoverable mistake.) Editing your document for a bit before doing a Save as with auto save is the same as mistakenly saving your document – overwriting your old document – instead of doing a Save as. That mistake is catastrophic – I know it, I used to make it often enough myself – and users would make it all the time had Apple left Save as in.

Now when you open an old document you will be asked – as soon as you start editing – whether you want to edit the document or duplicate it, thus avoiding that catastrophic mistake. You can also duplicate documents at any time.

The transition period will be painful, that’s for sure, but the end result is pure bliss. It’s worth it.

A lot of changes with Lion are just like this. Sometimes some pain while transitioning is the price for awesomeness.

Personally I miss my Save As and I am not a fan of auto-save, but I think it's horseshit that someone downvoted this.

And what if my workflow involves making multiple files based off the same document? Say I making png buttons in Photoshop. I change the test to "Order" pick save as, type "order.png", change the text to "Cancel" pick save as, type "cancel.png", change the text to "Help" pick save as, type "help.png".

It sounds like that work flow just got massively tedious.

Duplicate → Save, Duplicate → Save.

One step turned two. Worse? Yes. Tedious? No. It’s worth it given the other conceptual changes and the fact that this is very much an edge case.

A lot of programs have some kind of auto-save, here is how it works in Microsoft Word. While editing your document, it is auto-saved, but as a new, hidden file. When you manually Save, this new file overwrites the old, and a Save As does the same, but with the new name, not wiping the old document. You can argue that this is messy, and only a hack to get around the paradigm. It all depends on how people want to work, giving the program the responsibility to handle it.

Thanks for the clear explanation of the rationale.

Here's my work flow when I'm writing a long document: - Create/open "Master copy". - Regularly Save/enable Autosave. - When I have completed a chapter/segment, or before for lunch/supper, I Save and Save As on my backup HDD with a time-stamp/chapter number.

Like this I have one copy that I can edit and is always up to date on my main HDD and I have a whole record of copies on my backup HDDs. If I want to see how I edited chapter 3 whilst I was writing chapter 6 (they're related in the plot) I can.

I can't imagine this being something unknown of in the use of other applications. A franchisee that tracks various performance metrics each hour/day on a rolling database (month/year) sends a copy at regular intervals to the franchise owner/manager so that general franchise performance can be evaluated will have the same problem.

I can see how Duplicate -> Save is "only one click more", but the one-click solution worked well. If the "paradigm shift" is related to auto-saves, why not simply have the auto-saves create a new hidden file by default. Either the changes are saved (cue overwriting of the opened file), or the changes are saved as. If the user exits without saving, the hidden file can be marked for auto-delete in X days/hours, making erroneous exits recoverable. If there's a crash/loss of power, the hidden file is prompted for recovery at the program's next start.

Sure it does, it just auto-saves to whatever your last "Save As" was.

It’s possible to do but it would confuse. It doesn’t make sense conceptually.

I've not used lion so am not familiar with it, but going from what someone else is saying above, you need to 'duplicate' then 'save'. If it's autosaving, this doesn't make sense conceptually either. Why would the app not be autosaving once the duplicated document has been created? Why do you need to save separately?

You still have to save one first time, else the OS wouldn’t know where to put the file and how to name it. Lion only auto saves after that. That is irrespective of whether your create a new file or duplicate a file. (Apple could have been a lot more radical here, I’m unsure whether they should have been. That certainly would have meant a lot more work and it would have been an even more complicated transition.)

I would have thought that the duplicate function would have had 'duplicate it where?' in it.

The only reason I can think of for not having this is so you could make temporary changes to a document and not have them saved - which just seems to be a different way of arranging the cart and horse compared to the 'save as' workflow. With the Save As workflow, temporary changes are simply not saved. With the Duplicate workflow, you have to dupe the document first to avoid unwanted saving, then make your temporary changes. I don't see much of an improvement overall.

The new behavior protects from the following scenario (which I think is very common): Someone wants to use an old document as a template and in the process overwrites the old document. That’s data loss and the user likely becomes unable to even find the new document since it’s saved under the name of the old document.

It used to be the case that users had to actually make a mistake in order for this to happen (i.e. they had to forget to do a Save as and do a Save instead – that happened to me way too often, though), with auto save they would make that mistake automatically and every time.

I think what Apple could do is add a “Duplicate and save” function, I don’t think Save as is salvageable with auto save.

The new "Duplicate" then "Save" paradigm is not making me particularly happy.

It must be so automatic to me to go to Finder >> Preferences >> Sidebar and check / uncheck stuff that I didn't know Home wasn't checked by default.

Wait- they removed "Save as"? I am so glad I chose to ignore Lion.

Only in Apple-produced apps like TextEdit. Microsoft Word, etc. still have it.

Oh my god, so it's inconsistent and it's a step in the wrong direction?

They removed it for all apps that auto save. Save as doesn’t really make sense if an app auto saves and only serves to confuse.

You now duplicate and then save.

When I saw the previews for Lion I thought autosave seemed like overkill. When I'm working on anything I "autosave" by reaching over slightly and hitting CMD-S every time I make any small amount of progress. The last time I experienced significant data/progress loss was probably about 3 years ago before I developed this habit. I don't see what problem they're trying to fix.

Well, then you haven’t met my parents. (I also hit Cmd-S frequently but sometimes I honestly forget.)

Auto save is an obvious improvement. The whole saving paradigm sucked and I’m so happy that Apple is tackling it.

The problem is: Most people don't do that, especially new computer users. (Or, these days, people who are used to web apps, which don't use command-S.)

They don't learn until they've been burned, probably quite badly. If the computer doesn't HAVE to burn them in the first place, why should it?

Like you, I also have a tic of hitting command-S. However, I don't think requiring the user to develop a tic to keep their data safe is very good usability.

> When I'm working on anything I "autosave" by reaching over slightly and hitting CMD-S every time I make any small amount of progress . . . I don't see what problem they're trying to fix.

Um, that?

The concept of "save" was good for a time, but having everything autosave is absolutely forward progress.

My Macbook Air just kernel panicked about 20 minutes ago (which, admittedly, shouldn't happen). I had to hold down the power button, and then turn it back on. Less than one minute after the crash my laptop's state, opened programs, tabs, files, unsaved progress, was restored.

"When I'm working on anything I "autosave" by reaching over slightly and hitting CMD-S every time I make any small amount of progress."

I would say this is exactly the problem they are trying to fix.

Hahah, maybe, but I'm happy doing it. I have control that way. I can't tell the computer to stop auto-saving can I? That way I can take risks when I'm coding etc and always revert what I did if it was a mistake.

    3) The green maximize button still doesn't maximize.

This isn't and has never been a "maximize" button. It's supposed to zoom the window to fit the content as best it can without scrolling. It's up to the developer to implement it properly with their own logic.

But very, very few apps ever get it right, and most people seem to just want minimize and maximize.

Have you ever used a 30" display? Maximizing windows does not make a whole lot of sense there, especially considering the difference in window contents on Windows vs Mac (ie. self-contained menubar, etc).

That's where the newer Microsoft Windows method of maximizing into 1/2 the screen works well. I'd prefer if it were customizable to work in thirds, though.

I maintain that people think of multi-windowed UI in terms of windows first. Resizing a window to fit the content makes less sense than resizing the content to fit the window. People also seem to get really upset when UI interaction isn't consistent, and the Mac approach means that it varies wildly between apps.

You can drag a window to a corner to get it to fill a quarter screen. Kind of hard to hit the lower corners (it is not the screen corner but the top of the taskbar).

What proportion of OSX users use 30" displays?

Hell, what proportion of them use desktop-variety computers?

1440x900 screen, absolutely can’t stand maximized windows – hate them, actually.

It's still not an argument to optimise OSX for the use case of 30" monitors though.

27" iMac is pretty popular

If you're going to criticize it, at least do so in a constructive way. In your list of 7, I see 2 real complaints.

1) Agreed, this can be annoying.

2) The buttons are visually smaller, but have the same target click area.

3) It behaves the same way it did before, so this isn't any worse.

4) The new scrolling takes a day or two to get used to, and then is better. If you really don't like it, there's an option to toggle it off. This isn't an issue.

5) Agreed, it is arguably slower and tends to drain the battery faster. It's also doing more. It sucks, but that's the price of progress.

6) As I see it, FireVault is a huge plus and not at all a drawback. Was there anything 'terrible' about the process other than that it was lengthy? And really, a one-time conversion cost for such a huge improvement to this feature was a problem for you?

7) This happens with practically every desktop OS upgrade ever and, as you mentioned, isn't a problem anymore.

So besides #1 and #5, are there other real complaints?

I'd personally add "really botched multi-touch gestures" to the list, but I'm genuinely curious if it's actually that much worse or people are just piling onto this rant.

Lion is the first OSX version I've used, and it's really hard for me to understand these complaints.

1) Removed? It's still in there for office and photoshop

2) Never really need to minimize, use mission control

3) Have no use for that green button, use full screen apps

4) Coming from Windows, learned reverse scrolling in 15 minutes, now the other way feels strange

5) Can't really address this, this macbook air is by far the fastest computer I've used

6,7) Haven't noticed these

6 - It has to un-encrypt all of your data and re-encrypt it.

This is always going to be slow, especially if it is on a single spinning disk.

“We all know how annoying the switch to Mission Control was, right?”

No, we certainly don’t. I love Mission control and I think it’s an improvement over Exposé. Don’t pretend I’m agreeing with you.

For me personally Lion has been a solid improvement. Quite a few things that used to suck about OS X still suck but I have seen nothing but improvements or neutral changes with Lion. (Yeah, I have some minor quibbles, but mostly about apps I hardly ever use anyway.) I had no technical issues at all. Again, that’s for me personally.

The thing about mission control is that they could easily have left the old expose intact as an optional alternative, but nooooo they had to remove it completely and fuck up thousands of users' workflow habits. I mean you have to admit the way mission control stacks windows on top of each other for each application is pretty ridiculous. Other than that it's fairly useful.

But there was no good reason to remove the 'all app expose' feature, leaving only the within app expose. They either just overlooked it or want to brainwash users into some sort of app centric paradigm.

It reminds of when they released the magic mouse and you could no longer have expose mapped to a third mouse button. Surely wasn't the only user dependent on such a useful feature.

I like the way Mission Control stacks windows. As for leaving unstacked windows in: Yeah, well. That’s not how Apple rolls. Love it or hate it.

> But there was no good reason to remove the 'all app expose' feature, leaving only the within app expose. They either just overlooked it or want to brainwash users into some sort of app centric paradigm.

Do you mean the "Show all Windows for the current app"? I'm pretty sure it's still there. Might have a different gesture tho.

No I mean there used to be two forms of expose - show all within app, which I almost never used (it would only be useful if you had a truly ridiculous number of windows open, really), and show all windows across all applications including the finder. They've taken away the latter, which was the useful one.

Most times I hit expose in the past it was to go to a window of another application. For instance switching between the code I was editing in Coda or Textmate to the webpage I was building in Safari, or the graphics I was manipulating in Preview. In fact I did this constantly. Now it's a two step process: select the app in mission control, and then do expose once you're in the app. It wouldn't be so bad if the way Mission Control stacked the app windows wasn't so useless - when you expand them they should at least fill the screen so you can see everything, instead they become just slightly less bundled together, forcing you to footer about with the pointer to get what you want.

Expose was one of the best GUI innovations ever, IMO, and they've bloody ruined it.

Totally agreed. To add more reasons:

1. I don't have money for an SSD right now, and Mission Control can take up to 10 seconds to start, presumably because some stuff on another Space had been swapped to disk. I just used a friend's 800 MHz iMac G4 at a party and damn, Exposé was instant!

2. I don't even want to see stuff on another space. I move apps on spaces to FOCUS, not to see my unwritten report at the top of my desktop when switching apps on one space.

> He has given one example of what he thinks is wrong.

Most of it being... not smart?

> Right now, since I've switched to Gmail, I'm trying to back up and remove from my machine years of accumulated mail storage from mail.app. First obstacle: a user's library files are now hidden.

No, the ~/Library folder is now hidden, you can see it via Terminal, by opening the Finder's Go menu with an option-click or browse it because you know the path (cmd-shift-G, for instance). This change is sensible: how often does a user need to go into the Library folder?

> Finally find them (thanks Matt Silver), back up the files to an external disk, and then delete them. But then when I empty the trash, an ungodly number of files--going back years--claim they are "in use" and can't be deleted. So here I am having to click "continue" every few thousand files (if I'm lucky) as I page through more than 400,00 files to be deleted. I know this is actually an old mis-feature - but why the devil wouldn't they give you an "ignore" checkbox or a "delete whatever you can checkbox"? This has been a problem for years, but never fixed, while they add new gloss all the time.

He hates OSX now because of something which has been there forever? Like the trash refusing to delete open files you moved there?

There are issues with OSX and there are debatable changes, but his post is simply nonsense.

I wouldn't be surprised if the mail files were 'in use' due to Spotlight indexing.

The workaround for that would probably be to tell Spotlight to not index mail.

Or else, perhaps, to delete them from within Mail.app?

Battery life degradation when moving from SL to Lion. Apple forums are full of examples. [3] (78 page thread, no confirmation or fix from Apple).

Wow! 78 page thread! Almost all are saying me too. And no sound in blogosphere! Just imagine if same thing happens in microsoft discussion forum. Tech bloggers really cut some slack for apple.

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