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Comment by vegardx | Hacker News Reader

I can't really say I love the direction Apple is taking with Mac OSX. They make really radical changes to how things work, and for a phone that might be okay, I don't use my phone that much, but with every update (or so it seems, after Snow Leopard) I have to change my workflow. With Lion I even didn't fully recover.

As an example, with Lion they more or less removed Spaces entirely. This was a killer feature for me (and many many developers / professional users), instead they replaced it with some sort of fullscreen-ish-applications.

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They removed Spaces? Huh? Browser, Chat/Mail, Emacs & Terminals, Illustrator & Pages; I'd go nuts if I couldn't get my workspace set up that way, the way it's been since I had to buy virtual desktops as a third party app before 10.5.

It works exactly the same way in Lion. Better, from the perspective of moving apps from Space to Space.

The only thing I see different in Lion is that you can't do two-dimensional layouts of Spaces.

Personally the issue I have with the Lion implementation of Spaces, is that it is not two-dimensional. I use a 2x2 grid of spaces on Snow Leopard, and I love it because I have my workflow set up to go around in a circle:

Coda in one screen, Tower for version control and deployments in the next screen, Terminal and MySQL Chrome for managing the remote server and verifying deployments, Chrome for web testing. After I've made the loop so to speak, I'm ready to go back to Coda to fix a bug or work an another feature, and the circle begins again.

So my mental model works in a circle, with each next step only a screen away. In Lion the screens are laid out in one line, and I feel like it is harder to get to the screen I want. I have to remember the number of the screen rather than just the position of the screen. (For example upper right, lower right, lower left, upper left.)

You can't arbitrarily drag windows from space to space in the "expose" view in Lion, as far as I can tell. You have to 1) Switch to the space the window is open in and then 2) Drag the window from the current space to another. I liked Spaces much better.

That is annoying, but you don't have to fully switch to the space containing the window. In mission control, you can three-finger swipe through your spaces to get to the expose view for the space that has the app you want, then drag it to the smaller space icon at the top. Still more work than the old way, but you don't have to leave mission control.

Spaces most certainly is still there, only it's not called "Spaces" anymore.

(see http://mattgemmell.com/2011/07/27/using-spaces-on-os-x-lion)

If you've been using Lion all this time thinking spaces no longer work then this is your lucky day!

The worst is the complete removal of "all windows" Exposé in Snow Leopard. You can still see all app windows, but never all windows spread across the screen with no bundling.

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