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Comment by tristan_louis | Hacker News Reader

You're not. The continuing IOSification of OSX is something that has been bugging me too and part of why, to date, I've yet to upgrade to Lion. It looks like Apple wants to create a more iOS-like approach across all its products, which is fine if you buy into the whole ecosystem.

It also seems there's a trend here, with Apple bringing iOS increasingly into OSX and Microsoft bringing Windows Phone into Windows 8, the only operating systems which still are aimed primarily at computer users are Unix or Linux based.

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At the end of the day, the Mac is still the developer platform for iOS Apple has been really good to Mac developers, and I don't see them stopping anytime soon (it is totally against their interest in having a great apps ecosystem on iOS).

Lion is great. Swiping between full-screen desktops is a huge productivity boost. Touchpad gestures instead of hotkeys to bring up Expose is awesome. Yes it's iOS-ified, but it takes the good things from iOS that fit naturally with the touchpad.

At the same time, the UNIX guts of OS X keep getting better. Grand Central is an awesome API that you can use from C. 64-bit support is almost seamless. You can swipe just fine between full-screen terminal windows. Xcode keeps getting less shitty, LLVM and LLDB keep getting better. Objective-C keeps seeing feature and performance improvements. The API's keep being improved.

People are afraid that the gains for iOS means losses for OS X, but all I've seen so far are gains for OS X, largely focused on revamping the UI to take full advantage of the multi-touch capabilities of modern Mac hardware.

> "Xcode keeps getting less shitty"

Are you kidding? XCode 4 is one of the most unstable pieces of software that Apple has ever released. It crashes all the time and is borderline unacceptable as an IDE.

Check out: https://twitter.com/search/realtime/xcode%20crash

I have yet to use Lion, so I cannot comment if the iOS metaphor suits the personal computer, but I am all for the vendors trying something new. The desktop metaphor has been used for multiple decades now, with very little variation. While it has proven to work well, is it the best we can do, or are we stuck with baby duck syndrome?

98% of the time for me at least Lion remains near identical to previous OS X versions from a UI perspective (with the exception of full screen which was just a glaring omission from all previous version IMHO).

The "Back to the Mac" line might be good marketing but massive over sell if viewed as literal truth. What they did was identify a few holes in the UI (for instance that you might not have every application you wanted in your dock but that going through your applications folder was a pain) and fill them with iOS-ish solutions.

But if you don't want them, you don't use them, they've not taken any of the old stuff away.

Why in the hell would navigating a bunch of sequential screens full of huge icons be less of a pain than an applications folder? Thank god for application launchers in any case.

And they did screw with the old ui stuff in Lion. For example, they completely fucked up Spaces when they merged everything into Mission Control. It now takes twice as long to move between spaces; you're treated to a stupid iOS-style "fade in" animation, wasting even more of your time; the steps to move a window between spaces is now more complicated; and they removed rows. Why? I assume they wanted to make it look exactly the way it does on iOS, where you just have a horizontal series of windows. This is simple and intuitive. It's also stupid as hell.

> Why in the hell would navigating a bunch of sequential screens full of huge icons be less of a pain than an applications folder? Thank god for application launchers in any case.

Because you can organise them, group related stuff together and so on as opposed to having a single long list. I admit that I don't really use it (I prefer stacks in the dock) but it's better than the application folder.

> And they did screw with the old ui stuff in Lion. For example, they completely fucked up Spaces when they merged everything into Mission Control. It now takes twice as long to move between spaces; you're treated to a stupid iOS-style "fade in" animation, wasting even more of your time; the steps to move a window between spaces is now more complicated; and they removed rows. Why? I assume they wanted to make it look exactly the way it does on iOS, where you just have a horizontal series of windows.

Fair enough, I didn't really use Spaces previously so I'd not noticed the changes, though I'm not sure what you mean about the fade in. Mine transitions very quickly between spaces with no fade in.

> This is simple and intuitive. It's also stupid as hell.

Can you explain this? Simple and intuitive are good. How is that stupid.

This worries me too, and I hope it doesn't go too far. However I am using Lion and in general I don't really notice it in this OS.

In fact, other than the reverse scrolling behaviour (which would be easy to revert if I cared) I rarely notice any difference in behaviour between my Lion laptop and my girlfriend's Snow Leopard laptop.

the good thing is you can always use Windows or Linux.

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