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Comment by Derbasti | Hacker News Reader

I don't know man. You sound like you just don't like new stuff.

That said, I am not very excited about many pieces of the Lion UI either. Inertial scrolling is amazingly useful, though. Also, I quite like the 'Ribbon' in Office. Much better discoverability than all those hundreds of menus beforehand.

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I can't speak for the parent, but personally, I just don't like awful new stuff. My iMac has a 27" display and a fairly expensive set of peripherals. It's not an iPad. In their efforts to make it into one, they broke nearly everything they touched. Scrolling that can't be set up the way I want it (without third party utilities), scroll bars that hide useful information in order to save 0.04% of screen real estate, full screen windows that are almost always massive overkill, but can't really be ignored because to implement them they had to break useful functionality in Spaces. The list goes on, well, not quite forever, but the list of stupid ideas in Lion is to a first approximation, the same as the list of ideas in Lion.

The single greatest improvement I've seen in the time I've had my iMac was when the hard drive died and it came back with Snow Leopard without me having to spend the time to downgrade it myself.

See, I don't really agree with that. Yes, fullscreen is worse than useless on more than one monitors. But you don't have to use it. Fullscreening an app on a big monitor was never very useful in the first place.

But as I said, inertial scrolling is great. Spaces are great. The gestures to navigate spaces are great.

All that Versions and Autosave stuff is atrocious. But I rarely stumble into it since I mostly use Emacs.

I really like the non-existent scrollbars. I don't miss having those ugly grab-bars on every window one bit.

All things told, I'd rather have Lion than Snow Leopard, but really only by a small margin.

> But you don't have to use it.

Except that the useless button replaced one that I actually used before. Especially Finder windows are a pain to get to 'normal mode'.

> I really like the non-existent scrollbars.

The problem is that they only work when the content is obviously clipped, which is easier to ensure on the iPhone.

I had two instances where the content seemed to perfectly fit its box (Xcode4 & Recovery Partition). Took me a while to find out that there's more.

I appreciate what Lion aims for, but I could rant about its usability for hours. Almost all my bugs are duplicates, and they are all still open even after 10.7.3. :(

Fullscreening an app on a big monitor was never very useful in the first place.

We use a mac mini for a 'display wall' monitor... which it turns out sucks because OSX doesn't like you fullscreening things.

Then there's the good old 'everyone gather 'round, I want to show you how this works' type thing.

Then there's wild differences in the visual area available on a 13" screen vs 27"+

There's plenty of use for fullscreening programs.

I'd bet a million dollars Apple's gonna fix the full screen "bugs" in a future release. They probably just haven't figured a good way (and API) for that...

If inertial scrolling were actually implemented everywhere, I might be alright with it. Instead, it exists for the normal case of scrolling content, but when you go to use spaces you hit right and the content goes left. The same thing happens when you scroll to the side to go back/forward, though this is only true if you conceptually represent your current web page as the rightmost of a sequence.

I have liked that Spaces is no longer incredibly broken, but it's a bit annoying that I can't have any configuration other than a really long line full of virtual desktops.

The "make it like iOS" thing scared the hell out of me. Desktops and laptops are not the same type of device as iOS devices. Attempts to unify them will result in ugliness and functional regression.

The problem with scrolling in Lion is not so much that it's "new stuff" but rather that it breaks a convention that people (even Apple users) have been used to for decades. All of a sudden, by moving your pointer down, you scroll up. It is freaking annoying.

I don't know, I don't like most of the changes in Lion. They look like a really bad "first step" towards something that isn't there yet. Like removing your car's wheels just because you imagine that at some point people will want flying cars that work on antigravity. And then you get the inconsistent bits like making the window buttons smaller. Just... crap.

  > it breaks a convention that people (even Apple users)
  > have been used to for decades

And it took me about 40 minutes to adjust. I just told myself "you are moving content within a window, not window around the content, just like you do on iPhone" and thing everything clicked into places.

I'll make the seemingly-obvious argument that is made every time this issue comes up in Internet forums: "natural" scrolling is fine for a single user of a single computer, but if you use multiple computers -- particularly multiple OSes -- "natural" scrolling is anything but natural.

Further, it may be easy to adapt to for one person on one system, but what is the net benefit? It seems to me the sole benefit for "natural" scrolling (and most other Lion changes) is seen primarily in unifying the UI for users who own a Mac and one or more iOS devices. Otherwise, it's yet one more change forcing users to adapt. And yet, the new scrolling method is the default. Was the old way really hindering anyone?

Just like an iPhone, where you touch the screen, and there is no touchpad or mouse, so not like an iPhone at all.

If we kept on doing things by tradition though, we'd be stuck with some of the base assumptions of the first computers. Breaking changes are absolutely necessary for many kinds of changes, especially one like scrolling direction where there are only two mutually-exclusive options.

They don't always lead to improvement, but they are a requirement a large amount of the time. Why the nostalgia for what you've used for 'decades'?

All this talk of suddenly the scrolling going in a different direction reminds me of playing Halo in middle school. Everyone knew who played "inverted" to avoid picking up their controller.

I agree with you though, I bought a refurbished Macbook Pro for school this summer and I was so happy to learn refurbished machines still shipped with Snow Leopard.

The scrolling direction change was one of the few changes in Lion's UI that I actually liked; it took me an hour or two to get used to it, but I'd gotten scrolling directions confused between iPad and iPhone and the Mac before that -- especially when the iPad was propped up and facing me, like a monitor.

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